DirectWrite

DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update installed). DirectWrite is hardware-accelerated (using the GPU) when running on top of Direct2D, but can really render on the CPU to any target, including a GDI bitmap.

In Windows 8.1, DirectWrite gained support for color fonts.

The XPS viewer in Windows 7 uses DirectWrite, but it renders the output on a GDI+ surface.

Internet Explorer 9 and later versions use DirectWrite layered over Direct2D for improved visual quality and performance. Firefox 4 also added DirectWrite support, but rendering in the DirectWrite specific style was made non-default for some fonts in Firefox 7 due to user complaints about the rendering quality.

Microsoft Office 2013 supports either Direct2D/DirectWrite or GDI/Uniscribe for display rendering and typography.

Google Chrome in Windows supports DirectWrite starting from version 37.

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