Text drawing "bold"

Question

So I'm writing a program that generates a chart and saves it to PNG. From what I've read, if I were drawing to a window, it doesn't behave this way, but I'm not doing that.

The problem is that when I pass the brush I use to draw the label to another method to do the drawing, sometimes the text comes out looking bold. Also, the Y coordinate seems to have something to do with it, since it happens on every other row of the chart I'm drawing. And it's not a nice bold, either, it's like a gritty, messy looking bold. Some people have suggested changing the text rendering hint to antialiased, and it solves the "bolding" problem, but it doesn't look as nice as ClearType.

Note that none of this happens if I do everything in one method without passing the brush around, which is the most puzzling part of this. Any ideas?

Here's some of the code:

        // Draw the timeline.
        int y = 0;
        bool shadeRow = true;
        foreach (TimelineRow row in timeline.chart)
        {
            int rowHeight = row.height + TimelineRow.ROW_GAP;
            if (shadeRow)
            {
                g.FillRectangle(shadeBrush, 0, y, chartWidth, rowHeight);
            }

            // Draw name labels, guidelines, and timeline row.
            g.DrawString(row.name, labelFont, labelBrush, PADDING, (int)Math.Ceiling(y + (float)PADDING / 2));
            for (int i = 0; i < row.years.Length; i++)
            {
                int blockX = labelsWidth + i * TimelineRow.DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
                g.DrawLine(i % 5 == 0 ? yearGridDark : yearGridLight, blockX, y, blockX, y + rowHeight);
            }
            DrawRow(row, g, labelsWidth, y + 8);

            y += rowHeight;
            shadeRow = !shadeRow;
        }

        // Draw the year labels
        int x = labelsWidth;
        for (int year = timeline.startYear; year <= timeline.endYear; year += 5)
        {
            string yearString = Convert.ToString(year);
            int width = (int)g.MeasureString(yearString, labelFont).Width;
            g.DrawString(yearString, labelFont, labelBrush, x - width / 2, y);
            x += 5 * TimelineRow.DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
        }

Answer 1

I've had similar issues with drawing strings. In my cases, clearing the image FIRST with the background color has fixed the problem.

Wow, that actually did it.

Use Graphics.Clear() to set the initial color:

Bitamp bmp = new Bitmap(...);
Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bmp);
g.Clear(Color.White);
// ... now draw with "g" ...