Direct2D does not support rendering to rich metafiles in Internet Explorer 9

Platforms

Clients – Windows Vista | Windows 7 | Windows 8 Servers – Windows Server 2008 | Windows Server 2008 R2 | Windows Server 2012

Description

Due to internal rendering changes in Internet Explorer 9, the IHTMLElementRender::DrawToDC and IViewObject::Draw APIs will now create a metafile containing a single bitmap that represents the web content instead of a rich metafile containing text and vector info. This change was due to the move from GDI rendering to hardware-accelerated Direct2D (D2D) rendering.

This change affects apps that use these APIs and rely on text or vector info in the metafile.

Manifestation

Depending on the app that is affected by this change, users might see broken or incorrect behavior in their apps.

Mitigation

Apps that only need to extract text info from a web document (without positioning info) can use the innerText property to extract text.

Apps that use IViewObject::Draw can use the FEATURE_IVIEWOBJECTDRAW_DMLT9_WITH_GDI feature control key to revert to GDI rendering if the document mode:

  • Is less or equal to 8
  • The FCK authorizes that host to use GDI
  • And a metafile DC is passed to the API

Resources