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I currently have an image of Notepad that uses a specific color in its dialog:

enter image description here

I'd like to obtain the color used here, but at zooming in it looks like this (I guess because of ClearType):

enter image description here

It's basically a combination of different colors, so that it looks better without zooming in.

How do I obtain the original color used here to paint the text? I'd like to use the same color, but I don't know which of all those colors in the zoomed-in picture to pick.

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It's called subpixel rendering by the way – Phil Apr 4 '11 at 4:49

migrated from ux.stackexchange.com Apr 3 '11 at 23:17

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

What I did in the end was:

  • Draw a string in any color myself (creating a Label in VS.NET).
  • Make a screenshot and see which pixel of which letter uses exactly the same color when using ClearType and that you supplied in VS.NET (ForeColor property). This is, for example, the pixels in the second column of the second downstroke of the letter 'n'.
  • Capture the color of that pixel of that letter the Notepad dialog.

... and then you get rgb(0, 51, 188). When I use that color, my custom Label looks just like the Notepad dialog, so I guess I've solved the problem.

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up vote 2 down vote

Turn off cleartype and try again.

Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display

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I'm sorry but although some text in Windows does change, the text in this dialog doesn't... – pimvdb Apr 4 '11 at 16:30

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