I always thought that this was (for lack of proper terminology) a subset of the font. IIRC, many fonts have the option of being embossed or shadowed just as nearly all fonts support bold or italic formating.

Hi,

Like Thunder_Hawk implicitely said, it is the same font. But as far as I known (yep... wrote it in extenso) this is not a subset of the font, this is simply how the text is painted in the control. You may want to have a look to the Win32 API DrawState() (from msdn) for further information.

Once this is known, it makes it clear that you cannot change the way it will be drawn by simply doing some strange font operation. The only way you can do that is by using an OWNERDRAW button. I do not know how you can do this by using pure ATL, but it should not be that complex. You may have to derivate a class from the button class, specify the ownerdraw style in the VC++ resource editor, then overiride a DrawItem method to change the standard behavior.

As a sidenote, this kind of grayed button is well known in the Windows world. Are you sure you are trying to change the default behavior for a good reason ?

HTH,