How to set g:text style to bold font in a Windows Gadget?

Question

I'm developing a Vista/Win7 Desktop Gadget that uses a translucent g:background (doc) area with g:text (doc) on top. I'm adding the text via addTextObject (doc), and this all works as expected.

However, I can't figure out how to set that text to bold style. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this directly via the exposed properties that I can see, and I can't use regular text + CSS in this case due to the fact this text is placed onto a g:background object.

I have also tried specifying a bold font directly, such as Arial Bold (doesn't work) instead of Arial (works).

So how can this be done?

Edit: I have tried setting font-weight:bold for both the body and the g:background object that parents my text; no luck.

Answer 1

See Flip Calendar, by Jonathan Abbott. His code is usually well commented so maybe you can get some ideas from that.

EDIT
The source of my information was from the early days of Vista Beta 2 where that was the official word from MS. I also found the following response to a thread on the MSDN forums regarding the Flip Calendar gadget itself:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sidebargadfetdevelopment/thread/841e9d5e-32e9-453f-bd0e-dc5a4e607c33/

The gadget has options for setting bold font on the day of the month (a g:text object) but on closer inspection it doesn't work. Sorry about that. The MS guys have been known to be wrong as well on one or more occasions. I can honestly say that I don't use the g:text object.

This means your only (well, non activex route) option is VML text, which provides a lot of flexibility on layout. However, you will have to place it on a fully opaque area of the gadget which is probably why you wanted to use the addTextObject in the first place. Gary Beene's site really helped me out when I was getting started, but it doesn't go into any detail on the v:textbox element and the v:textpath element, though the MSDN documentation goes into enough detail on these.

If you need to place the text on a non-fully opaque area of the gadget, then you could still go the VML route and place an image behind the text that acts as a shadow, starting out fully opaque and fading to fully transparent. This is how Microsoft does text in window title bars with aero enabled.
Alternatively, you could create an ActiveXObject that draws the text you need in the font you want and saves the image to a temporary file in the gadget folder. Then you set that to the src of an addImageObject. I've done something similar in a gadget and it's fast enough not to be noticeable. You can also set min/max dimensions so shrinking/stretching to fit becomes a breeze.