DataGridView CellPainting drawing text with ampersand displays weirdly

Question

I have implemented a CellPainting event handler that uses TextRenderer.DrawText and it has worked great up until a cell had an ampersand in it. The cell shows the ampersand correctly while editing the cell, but when editing is done and it is drawn, it shows up as a small line (not an underscore).

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace StackOverFlowFormExample {
    public partial class DataGridViewImplementation : DataGridView {
        public DataGridViewImplementation() {
            InitializeComponent();
            this.ColumnCount = 1;
            this.CellPainting += DGV_CellPainting;
        }

        private void DGV_CellPainting(object sender, DataGridViewCellPaintingEventArgs e) {         
            if (!e.Handled && e.RowIndex > -1 && e.Value != null) {
                e.PaintBackground(e.CellBounds, false);
                TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, e.Value.ToString(), 
                                      e.CellStyle.Font, e.CellBounds,
                                      e.CellStyle.ForeColor, TextFormatFlags.VerticalCenter);
                e.Handled = true;
            }
        }
    }
}

//creating the datagridview
public partial class MainForm : Form {
    public MainForm() {
        InitializeComponent();  
        DataGridViewImplementation dgvi = new DataGridViewImplementation();
        this.Controls.Add(dgvi);
        dgvi.Rows.Add("this is a & value");
    }
}

replacing

TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, e.Value.ToString(), 
                      e.CellStyle.Font, e.CellBounds, 
                      e.CellStyle.ForeColor, TextFormatFlags.VerticalCenter);

with

e.PaintContent(e.ClipBounds);

shows it correctly, of course I want to be able to customize the painting of the content though. I've also tried using

e.Graphics.DrawString(e.Value.ToString(), e.CellStyle.Font, Brushes.Black, e.CellBounds);

but it doesn't draw it the same as

e.Paint(e.ClipBounds, e.PaintParts);

I use e.Paint in my actual code when a cell is being painted that doesn't need my customized painting.

How can I get e.Graphics.DrawString to look the same as e.Paint or get TextRenderer.DrawText to display the ampersand correctly?

Answer 1

You want to use the TextRenderer version since DrawString should really only be used for printing:

TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, e.Value.ToString(), 
                  e.CellStyle.Font, e.CellBounds, e.CellStyle.ForeColor, 
                  TextFormatFlags.NoPrefix | TextFormatFlags.VerticalCenter);

The NoPrefix flag will show the ampersand correctly.