TextOptions Class

Microsoft Silverlight will reach end of support after October 2021. Learn more.

Provides options for controlling the rendering behavior of text, which can be set through an attached property usage on a wide range of Silverlight types.

Inheritance Hierarchy

System.Object
  System.Windows.Media.TextOptions

Namespace:  System.Windows.Media
Assembly:  System.Windows (in System.Windows.dll)

Syntax

'Declaration
Public NotInheritable Class TextOptions
public static class TextOptions

The TextOptions type exposes the following members.

Attached Properties

  Name Description
Public attached property TextFormattingMode Gets the TextFormattingMode for the element
Public attached propertySupported by Silverlight for Windows Phone TextHintingMode Gets or sets a value that indicates whether text rendering is optimized for readability or animation.
Public attached property TextRenderingMode Sets the TextRenderingMode for the element.

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Fields

  Name Description
Public fieldStatic member TextFormattingModeProperty Identifies the TextFormattingMode dependency property.
Public fieldStatic memberSupported by Silverlight for Windows Phone TextHintingModeProperty Identifies the TextHintingMode attached property.
Public fieldStatic member TextRenderingModeProperty Identifies the TextRenderingMode dependency property.

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Remarks

By default, Silverlight optimizes text for readability. Although this is usually desirable, the rendering behavior that optimizes readability can have a large performance impact when you animate text. This is because during animation Silverlight is constantly redrawing the optimized text, and this optimization takes significant resources. When animating text, you will likely get better performance by turning off this readability optimization. To turn off readability optimization on a per-element basis, set the TextOptions.TextHintingMode attached property to Animated and then set it back to Fixed when the animation ends.

When you set TextOptions.TextHintingMode (or call SetTextHintingMode), the value and its associated behavior inherits to all objects that are within the visual tree beneath where the value is set.

Animation that applies to text is not necessarily limited to properties of text elements. The most obvious example of a text property that can benefit from Animated behavior when animated is TextElement.FontSize (or other FontSize properties on specific types). But it might also be beneficial to set Animated behavior whenever any container that contains text animates a property that affects rendering and layout. For example, if you apply a TranslateTransform to a Grid that contains text, that animation may look better if you set TextOptions.TextHintingMode to Animated on that Grid container.

Version Information

Silverlight

Supported in: 5, 4, 3

Silverlight for Windows Phone

Supported in: Windows Phone OS 7.1, Windows Phone OS 7.0

Platforms

For a list of the operating systems and browsers that are supported by Silverlight, see Supported Operating Systems and Browsers.

Thread Safety

Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.