Antialiased text on transparent bitmap

Question

I\'d like to draw antialiased text on a transparent bitmap and have the antialiasing drawn as alpha blended pixels. This way, I can draw the bitmap onto any color surface (o

Answer 1

Your text is displayed as it is because you have ClearType subpixel anti-aliasing mode enabled (which is the default on Vista and above). ClearType, by definintion, cannot play nice with alpha channel, since it blends colors, and thus isn't background-agnostic. So it ignores the alpha channel, and blends to black (which is your transparent color otherwise is). You need to enable plain grayscale anti-aliasing for the desired effect:

g.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.AntiAliasGridFit;