What is the best way to draw text along with geometry?

Question

In WPF, I'm starting to use classes such as LineGeometry, EllipseGeometry, GeometryGroup, Path... in order to draw 2D graphics. I chose these over shapes because I saw it could be faster thanks to the freezing feature.

I need to draw text along with geometry, with specific fonts. The text needs to be positionnable with the same coordinate system as the geometry. And I need to be able to apply a transform such as RotateTransform.

What would be the best way? I've run across the GlyphRunDrawing class but it's really complicated.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

To create a text geometry just use FormattedText.BuildGeometry, for example, to get a geometry of "Text to display" in font Tahoma size 16 pixels at point (5,5) use:

    FormattedText text = new FormattedText("Text to display",
        CultureInfo.CurrentCulture,
        FlowDirection.LeftToRight,
        new Typeface("Tahoma"),
        16,
        Brushes.Black);
    Geometry geometry = text.BuildGeometry(new Point(5, 5));

If you need to do this in XAML you can wrap up this code in a MarkupExtention