Question

I have a grid with this template and styles in WPF/XAML:

<Setter Property="TextOptions.TextFormattingMode" Value="Display" />
<Setter Property="RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint" Value="Enabled" />
<Setter Property="Template">
    <Setter.Value>
        <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type DataGridCell}">
            <Border Padding="{TemplateBinding Padding}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" SnapsToDevicePixels="True">
                <ContentPresenter x:Name="CellContent" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint="Enabled" />
            </Border>
            <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
                <Trigger Property="IsSelected" Value="True">
                    <Setter TargetName="CellContent" Property="TextOptions.TextFormattingMode" Value="Display" />
                    <Setter TargetName="CellContent" Property="RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint" Value="Enabled" />
                    <Setter TargetName="CellContent" Property="Effect">
                        <Setter.Value>
                            <DropShadowEffect ShadowDepth="2" BlurRadius="2" Color="Black" RenderingBias="Quality" />
                        </Setter.Value>
                    </Setter>
                </Trigger>
            </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
        </ControlTemplate>
    </Setter.Value>
</Setter>

The DropShadowEffect I have when you select a grid row, seems to make the text rendering blurry (gray anti-aliasing):

When I remove the drop shadow effect, it looks clear because it now uses ClearType and not gray sub-pixel anti-aliasing:

I have tried applying RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint="Enabled" to the ContentPresenter as seen above, but it does not help.

How do I force WPF to render the text that gets displayed with drop shadow effect to retain Cleartype anti-aliasing, instead of that ugly blurry gray sub-pixel anti-aliasing?

Some believe it’s blurry because of the drop shadow — this is not true. It’s blurry only because ClearType is not used. This is how it looks like in Firefox when shadow AND ClearType:

ClearType enabled text is colorful — but that blurry text is not, because it does not use ClearType — it uses gray sub-pixel anti-aliasing and that’s not how ClearType works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType

The question is: how do I enable ClearType for this text?

Answer 1

The DropShadowEffect object cannot work with ClearType. This is stated on the MSDN page How to: Create Text with a Shadow:

These shadow effects do not go through the Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) text rendering pipeline. As a result, ClearType is
disabled when using these effects.

After all, DropShadowEffect is a bitmap effect, not a text effect.