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). 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.

Features

In Windows 8.1, DirectWrite gained support for color fonts.

DWriteCore

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.

Uses

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. 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