How do I draw text using DirectX 12?

Question

I'm currently tasked with porting a control from Direct 11 to DirectX 12.

How do I draw text on the screen?

How do I draw any 2D on a DirectX 12 device?

Current Text rendering code is below:

using (var textFormat = new TextFormat(device2DManager.DirectWriteFactory, string.IsNullOrEmpty(text.FontName) ? FontName : text.FontName, text.FontSize == 0 ? FontSize : text.FontSize)) { renderTarget.DrawText(text.Text, textFormat, new RawRectangleF(autoPosition.HasValue ? autoPoint.X : text.Location.X, autoPosition.HasValue ? autoPoint.Y : text.Location.Y, renderTarget.Size.Width, renderTarget.Size.Height), foreColor); }

Answer 1

How did you draw your text with DirectX 11?

D3DX9, D3DX10, D3DX11 and in fact the entire legacy DirectX SDK are deprecated per MSDN. You don't actually need it for DirectX 11, and it doesn't support anything to do with DirectX 12. See Living without D3DX

For drawing text on Direct3D 11 or Direct3D 12, you have two basic choices:

1. You can use Direct2D/DirectWrite to render the text. With DirectX 11.1 or later, the device sharing makes this fairly straight-forward but it is a fair bit of code. This is the best option if you want to support complex layout, very large character sets, and highly scalable resolution output.

2. Alternative you can either implement or use the same 'spritesheet' based approach that was implemented in the legacy D3DX library font system. For C++, see SpriteFont in the DirectX Tool Kit for DX11 and DX12.

For C# using SharpDX, option (1) might be your best bet.