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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 first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update installed).[1] DirectWrite is hardware-accelerated (using the GPU) when running on top of Direct2D, but can also use the CPU to render on any target, including a GDI bitmap.[2][3]
In Windows 8.1, DirectWrite gained support for color fonts.[5][6]
DWriteCore is the Windows App SDK (Project Reunion) implementation of DirectWrite that runs on versions of Windows down to Windows 10, version 1809 (10.0; Build 17763), and opens the door for cross-platform usage.[7]
The XPS viewer in Windows 7 uses DirectWrite, but it renders the output on a GDI+ surface.[8]
Internet Explorer 9 and later versions use DirectWrite layered over Direct2D for improved visual quality and performance.[9][10][11] 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.[12]
Microsoft Office 2013 supports either Direct2D/DirectWrite or GDI/Uniscribe for display rendering and typography.[13]
Google Chrome in Windows supports DirectWrite starting from version 37.[14]
Telegram's desktop client uses DirectWrite to render color emojis on Windows.
Steam has the option to enable DirectWrite for improved font smoothing and kerning on its desktop client
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