Text and the User Interface
As we saw in the Introduction and Chapter 13, a
WPF application's appearance is defined by its visual tree—a tree of
objects derived from the Visual base
class. Text must fit into this model, but we have several different
options for adding text into the visual tree depending on the balance we
require between control and ease of use.
The lowest level at which we can work with text is to use the
visual layer drawing techniques introduced in Chapter 13. The next level up is to use the Glyphs class, which offers a similar level of
control as visual layer programming, but packaged into a framework
element. This enables it to be used from markup and to provide the usual
framework-level features, such as event support and participation in
layout. The GlyphRunDrawing class
offers similar features, but you can incorporate it into a drawing.
Finally, you can use the text object model in conjunction with one of
the elements that knows how to render this form of text, such as
TextBlock or FlowDocumentReader. TextBlock is the most widely used, as it
offers a good balance between simplicity and flexibility.
TextBlock
The TextBlock element is
usually the best choice for presenting simple text. It can handle both
plain text and formatted text, and can cope easily with anything from
a single character to a few paragraphs. Example 14-9 shows TextBlock at its simplest.
Example 14-9. Simple TextBlock
<TextBlock Text="Some text" />
Because TextBlock derives
from FrameworkElement ...
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