Text effect to enhance readability of small fonts

Question

In a view I have a smaller font, foreground is white and background is dark grey.

At the moment I use a drop shadow effect like

 <DropShadowEffect BlurRadius="0"
    Opacity="0.99"
    ShadowDepth="1"
    Direction="270"
    Color="Black"

This looks zoomed as this:

picture of text effect

It works good on bigger fontsizes, but not very good on small scales as can be seen here:

Picture of smaller size text effect

What would be a good text effect to enhance overall readability?

I found this question which uses an outer stroke around the text, but it does not work at all on smaller fontsizes.

I believe a zoom or scale effect would enhance the readability of the smaller fonts. — Sam Axe, Jul 13 '13 at 03:50
`TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display"` might improve the rendered text using a small size. — sa_ddam213, Jul 13 '13 at 06:15
Yes, the TextFormattingMode Display improves it a lot. Thank you. — Mare Infinitus, Jul 13 '13 at 08:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '13 at 16:46

3

For completeness:

As@sa_ddam213 said use TextFormattingMode. Furthermore you can experiment with the Anti-Aliasing algorithms via TextRenderingMode. If you use ClearType, you can additionally experiment with ClearTypeHint.

Alternatives are use larger text or a font specially designed for small sizes like a pixel font.

answered Jul 13 '13 at 16:46

Samuel

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Can you tell more about the pixelfont? At the moment I use Segoe UI and it performs not very well. – Mare Infinitus Jul 13 '13 at 17:30
Sure, LMGTFY, for example http://www.dafont.com/bitmap.php free pixel fonts, also called bitmap fonts designed to be displayed at very small sizes, usually you do not want any anti aliasing effects on them – Samuel Jul 14 '13 at 09:32

Text effect to enhance readability of small fonts

1 Answers1