Tag Archives: Optimization

Text rendering methods comparison or GDI vs. GDI+ revised

In this post, hopefully the last on this subject1, I'm going to compare the different text rending methods available for Windows .NET application for standard resolution devices2.
 
I decided to revise my original findings (see: The wonders of text rendering and GDI) and do a comprehensive comparison for three reasons:

  1. In response to my earlier post (see: GDI text rendering to image ) Kris commented he uses GraphicsPath for text rendering to image to achieve better visual quality than standard GDI+ text rendering.
  2. My latest "revelation" (see: Blurry/Fuzzy GDI+ Text Rendering using anti-alias and floating-point Y coördinates ) on improving GDI+ text rendering visual quality.
  3. GDI+ typographic StringFormat can offer good text measurement for custom text layout.

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The wonders of text rendering and GDI

My research into text rendering in .NET/Windows started with HTML Renderer, I have noticed text issues in the rendered HTML: fonts were pixelated, letter were too close, words were either too close or too far apart (Figure 1). Although minor issues they were bugging me, also I was hoping it will lead to some performance improvements as from my last optimization session text draw/measure were the most time consuming operations.
The resulted improvement exceeded my wildest expectations and worth a post on.
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Optimizing images usage in .NET – part 1

Using image is an integral part of GUI application but I have found very little resources on it's resource consumption and how I can optimize it. The goal of this post is exactly that, in part 1 I will show the performance impact and in part 2 I will propose an optimization.
I'm going to consider only the memory usage as CPU performance is generally insignificant.
 
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Using T4 Templates for caching image resources

In my project I'm doing a lot of native UI rendering1, soon I will blog on why.
Naturally I have many images to render using DrawImage methods, that requires an Image instance.
There are couple of ways to load an image but the best2 and easies option is using a Resource File, just dragging and dropping the images into the resource designer will add the file to the project and generate a nice static property by the name of the file in the static class generated by the name of the resource file.
The problem is that each time image resource property is called a new image instance is created with the requested image, so if the same image is used in multiple places3 it will be loaded multiple times in memory4.
 
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How I optimized HTML Renderer and fell in love with VS Profiler

Managed HTML rendering is a pain in the ass for a really long time, a really good solution I was able to find is this HTML Renderer hosted on CodePlex, though the project seems to be dead and I'm not sure how I can contribute… Anyway, It's 100% managed code and has nice HTML 4 and CSS level 2 spec cover.
So I decided to check it out and after a little playing around it felt a bit heavy so I decided to look into its performance using built in visual studio profiler, to ruin the ending I have managed to reduce average render time from 282 msec to 24 msec (91%).
The final code with most of the issues fixes raised here and here can be found here, you can use it under the same license the original code is under. Also, if everything goes well, I might be adding features to the project including text selecting for copy-paste support.
 
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