DirectWrite isn't necessarily much easier, but it has many perks you don't get from freetype - kerning, combining characters, etc - and supports hardware accele

DirectWrite isn't necessarily much easier, but it has many perks you don't get from freetype - kerning, combining characters, etc - and supports hardware acceleration, which is pretty cool. Because integrating pango/harfbuzz is so difficult I'm tempted to replace my freetype usages with DirectWrite...