Wesner Moise rants about the problems in GDI+. It's a good read and contains a link to a crucial KnowledgeBase article.You wouldn't think that one would fall back to GDI as an example of a "good" text-layout API, but at least it's lightweight. WPF has a vastly improved API for text-layout, but the first comment on the post sent a chill down my spine: "Wait until you try getting performance out of WPF Text."