Direct3D9 ID3DXFont Font Quality Seems Very Bad and Not Anti-Aliased - c++

Question

I'm currently working on developing an internal ui for games (just like imgui) and am stuck on the quality of fonts when they are rendered through DrawText (ID3DXFont), I've tried to use DrawTextA and link a sprite to the rendering of the font but it doesn't look like there is a difference. When comparing it to imgui it seems as if the quality of the text is much higher and is anti-aliased properly, although when using ANTIALIASED_QUALITY when creating the font doesnt seem much like the anti-aliasing done in imgui at all. I'd like to make my text look at good as imgui's as im really fed up with ID3DXFont looks but am wondering on how to make it look better.
Here's some examples between ID3DXFont and Imgui (both fonts are Arial Bold and rendered with size 23)
ImGui (in d3d9):
ID3DXFont:
this is what my text rendering looks like:
ID3DXSprite* Sprite = nullptr;
D3DXCreateSprite(Device, &Sprite);
Sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND);
Font->DrawTextA(Sprite, Text.c_str( ), Text.length( ), &Size, DT_NOCLIP, D3DColor);
Sprite->End( );
Sprite->Release( );
and my font initialization:
D3DXCreateFont(Device, 23.f, 0, FW_BOLD, 0, FALSE, DEFAULT_CHARSET, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS, ANTIALIASED_QUALITY, DEFAULT_PITCH, "Arial", &Font);

Answer 1

The first thing to say is that Direct3D 9's ID3DXFont interface is extremely old at this point, dating back to 2002 or even earlier. D3DX9, D3DX10, and D3DX11 are all deprecated as is the legacy DirectX SDK itself. See this blog post.
For Direct3D 10 or later, the recommended solution for high-quality, scalable font rendering on DirectX surfaces is DirectWrite (using Direct2D to render). The interop is a little complicated prior to DirectX 11.1, but is pretty simple with it (Windows 7 SP1 + KB2670838 installed, Windows 8.x, and Windows 10). See Microsoft Docs for DX11 / DX12.
The ID3DXFont solution as well as SpriteFont in the DirectX Tool Kit for DX11 / DX12 capture the TrueType glyphs into a texture at a specific font-size and then render them as a sprite-sheet. This is very fast, but does not have the scaling behavior of a vector-font solution like DirectWrite, FreeType, etc. That said, sprite-sheet fonts tend to look great as long as you are rendering them at the same resolution as they were captured at.
The images you show above are not 23 points high so they are going to squash a bit and you'll notice the difference between FreeType and a sprite-sheet solution in that case.
The D3XD9 ID3DXFont solution is a little more primitive than SpriteFont. D3DX9 always uses D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8 for the captured texture. SpriteFont can use a DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8, DXGI_FORMAT_B4G4R4A4, or DXGI_FORMAT_BC2_UNORM encoding. SpriteFont is also optimized for premultiplied alpha rendering.