The Paint.NET Team has announced the v3.5 of Paint.NET will use DirectWrite on Windows 7 for rendering text. DirectWrite is part of Windows 7’s text rendering enhancements. Very cool!
DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7. DirectWrite enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications. Applications can also use DirectWrite with GDI and carry forward existing investments in the Win32 code base. You can read more about DirectWrite here.
You can download an alpha build (build 3509) of Paint.NET v3.5 here. Please be warned that alpha builds are pre-beta quality and will likely have issues. But if you want to play around, give it a try.