VS2010 Beta 2 WPF tooltip text rendering issues | The Coffeehouse

androidi

EDIT: read my reply below. It appears the HALF of problem was the use of wrong font (In 2008 I have Courier New not Consolas). Second half seems to be that the Segoe UI doesn't seem to look right? It looks like some other font, despite the Font options - Tooltip claiming otherwise. It seems as if the tooltip is fixed to a bad looking font and the setting to change it doesn't work.

Do I need to do something to get it working? I uninstalled beta 1 from Win7rc, put Beta 2 in and:

^^ 400% :

Click on the image to open it full size if it's not.

I have 1600x1200 on a CRT using Intel G33 chip with integrated graphics. I've tried to change Font Smoothing setting but it didn't do much if anything in 2010b2, only worsen text in IE if disabled.

UPDATE, CLICK TO OPEN FULL SIZE:

Pay attention to how the "Open" and M's look in the tooltip and in Intellisense vs 2008. They look GREAT in 2008. And crap in 2010 beta 2!

Closer look.

figuerres
???

this is a CRT? wow... time to upgrade that!

is truetype anti-aliasing on?

if it it turn it off - it's meant for lcd displays NOT for a CRT.

rhm

In reply to figuerres

#Oct 21st @ 6:51 AM

Anti-aliasing as three settings: Off, Standard, Cleartype.

Cleartype is for LCDs only, but Standard is OK on CRTs (though not really necessary since they tend to blur font edges anyway).

androidi

In reply to figuerres

#Oct 21st @ 6:51 AM

I could go on about why I upgraded to CRT from LCD but that would be off topic.

I tried both with and without "smooth edges of screen fonts" setting. That disabled makes text in IE look awful. It didn't have any effect on text in VS2010b2.

I then tried to change the editor font from Consolas to Courier new. This made the text similar to VS2008. I'm happy with that. But it didn't fix the text in the box (says FileMode) you see in the OP (tooltip?) I couldn't find how that is changed. I'll try few more but would be very happy to know which Show settings for: / Display items: changes that incase I can't find it.

edit: Updated OP. I'm not sure exactly what is going on but something is buggy or not right. The tooltip text looks thousand times better in 2008.

androidi

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 7:28 AM

Please refresh and read op again, I added this image to clarify the issue.

Pay attention to how the "Open" and M's look in the tooltip and in Intellisense vs 2008. They look GREAT in 2008. And crap in 2010 beta 2!

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/4426/wpf2010beta2wtfcomments.png

zoomed:

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/7287/wpf2010beta2wtfzoom.png

I still haven't found how to fix the font that is pointed with ">>>>" in the image.

Dexter

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 7:59 AM

It looks like a bug to me. Yes, they "fixed" the WPF text rendering by moving to DirectWrite but now you have to set a couple of properties to get what you want (cleartype, grayscale, aliased etc.). Probably that tooltip isn't configured correctly (it looks like it is using grayscale antialiasing instead of cleartype).

androidi

In reply to Dexter

#Oct 21st @ 8:15 AM

It's hard to say but I don't think that using grayscale would be a problem. The problem is the weighting of the anti-alias.. The gray tones are too dark and make the O look like bold O. There also seems to be some kind of distortion of the O when viewed at 100%, it just doesn't look clean.

Dexter

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 8:28 AM

Yes, grayscale itself is not the problem but it is inconsistent with the other parts of the UI which use ClearType and this might indicate a bug. The font too seems to be inconsistent, some tooltips use the UI font and some appear to use a fixed width font.

Interestingly my tooltips look better than yours. Not sure what's different (Win7 here too).

rhm

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 7:28 AM

Consolas is a Cleartype-only font and shouldn't be used on CRTs or with Cleartype disabled. I guess the tooltip is a bug - report it.

AndyC

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 8:28 AM

I think this might be a Beta 1 -> Beta 2 upgrade issue. I don't get text anything like that bad on a completely fresh Beta 2 install (Vista 32-bit).

androidi

In reply to AndyC

#Oct 21st @ 9:01 AM

I didn't really specify any kind of "upgrade". First total uninstall, then install of beta 2 and when it asked "Do you want to migrate settings and so on" I unchecked the migrate environment and selected c#. This was on first run.

And while your screenshot is of bad quality (jpg blows), I'm see you have the same issue. The "O" and "n" in the Open in the Intellisense box below the Move are not as clean as 2008 has them, they look slightly bolder. This is better visible in the .png's I linked than your jpg which smothered the details.

Pay attention to the top right corner of "n" and shape of the O. They look aliased in the 2010 Intellisense dropdown and the O looks flatter.

AndyC

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 9:23 AM

Hmm, could have sworn i picked PNG when I saved that. Ah well. Here's a PNG version.

I still think the text issues you're having are the result of some residual Beta 1 effect, maybe the uninstall doesn't work so well. The text in your images is quite a way off what it's supposed to look like.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to AndyC

#Oct 21st @ 11:06 AM

Can you change the font settings in the IDE to use Conslas for tooltips maybe? Consolas is best for good, maybe it works nice with the tooltips too.

androidi

In reply to AndyC

#Oct 21st @ 11:06 AM

That does look better (see image below with yours zoomed). I'll have to do more tests (changing the ClearType settings for example as I've set it to be little bit on the bold side, looks good in IE but looks like WPF is interpreting the ClearType boldness level to be more than it should?)

edit: at 100% I could still tell that 2008 looks better, barely. On 400% zoom I can see the 2008 is still quite a bit thinner *bug smell*?. On comparison to my screenshot, my 2010 is shapewise identical to yours but the anti-alias bits are much lighter, making it look more bold.

androidi

In reply to androidi

#Oct 21st @ 11:55 AM

edit: This smells like the ClearType setting might have to do with this. I'll try adjusting that to see if I can get it close to 2008. It's just odd that in IE I do not see such problem. Maybe WPF is interpreting the cleartype weight/boldness level differently from IE?

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/1570/wpf2010beta2compare.png

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/7244/wpf2010beta2comparezoom.png

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

I installed it last night, and get the same problem as you (in both Intellisense and Tooltip). And it couldn't be an upgrade issue, because I never installed a previous version of VS 2010.

Andrew Jones

In reply to TommyCarlier

#Oct 21st @ 10:34 PM

I also have the same problem. I had not installed beta 1 either.

Andrew

androidi

Well. I installed clean Win7RTM and 2010 beta 2 (didn't install Office yet) and the text is indeed much better - I'd say it's around 80% of VS2008 quality. But then again I haven't played around with the ClearType settings yet at all, and at high resolution on this CRT it seems the ClearType default settings seem worse.

In the FileMode FileMode.Open tip the "f" and "M" letters are still quite fuzzy.

Have others who have the problem adjusted their ClearType settings before? Maybe there is a bug where if the system ClearType is tuned it can make the WPF ClearType much worse?

mglaze

Don't mean to push slightly off topic here, but hasn't anyone noticed that the tooltip originally posted above with the hover functionality is different from the tooltip when you get intellisense auto-complete? I.e. why is the description in the hover tooltip using the Consolas style (or whatever the fixed width font is), while the description in the intellisense tooltip is using Tahoma or something similar? If I recall, all descriptions were displayed in VS2008 in the Tahoma style, and that seems much better, right? I submitted a bug report for this last week, hope it's not a duplicate..

In relation to the original point about aliasing problems, I don't have them - I have a flatscreen with ClearType turned on, and I'm running VS2010b2 in a virtual pc running win svr 2008 as per the instructional video.

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

In reply to androidi

#Oct 26th @ 12:39 PM

It looks a lot like as if ClearType is applied two times on your computer for some weird reason. This might also be a bug in Windows, but since you're using a pre-release version... noone's gonna fix something like that.