Question

Ok, I have a rather strange request.

Due to the inconsistency in how different browsers support text with drop shadow, I was thinking that the text I need with drop shadow (some headers), I could create dynamically on the server side of my web app, and then pass the image to the browser instead of text directly.

I want to use WPF for this, since WPF has a lot of text manipulation built in, and it should be significantly easier to make text with drop shadow in WPF compared to GDI+.

So what I need to do is inside my Web App, create a WPF text element with the drop shadow effect, and save it inside an image (either to disk, or better yes pass it directly to the browser since I actually do not need to store the image since it will be specific for that request only).

I’m hoping for at least some pointers in the right direction 🙂

Answer 1

I just want to say, since this is unanswered and I don’t use WPF that much, GDI+ would actually be pretty easy:

1. Draw text on image using the desired color of the shadow.
2. Do a box blur (or Gaussian).
3. (optional) Create another bitmap and do basically a watermark style draw (this would allow you to set opacity and thus soften the shadow, etc.)
4. Draw text again using color desired for the text

With that you would have yourself text with a drop shadow. There’s about 10 different image processing libraries that make it rather simple (I will sadly do some self promotion and just say that Craig’s Utility Library has a draw text function and box blur function in the Utilities.Media.Image.Image class, but there’s tons of other packages you could use).