Question

Is there an official way to distribute (deploy) a specific font with a .NET application?

We have a (public domain) “LED font” that prints numbers with the retro LED instrumentface look. This is a standard True Type or Open Type font like any other except it looks funky.

Obviously for that to work, this font needs to be on the user’s machine. But we’d prefer to not force the user to “install our special font into your font folder”. We’d prefer to either load a Font object directly from the TTF, or programatically install the font so it’s available.

How do applications handle this sort of things? Eg, I notice Adobe XYZ installs various fonts on the system without user intervention. That’s what we’d like to do.

EDIT: okay, ideally, we’d prefer not to install the font directly. We don’t want our nifty themed LED font showing up in the user’s font dropdown in MS Word. We’d prefer to use this font, but restrict its use or appearance to our app. Any way to do this?

EDIT 2: This is for a WinForms .NET 2.0 app.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I use a custom font for my custom graphics-library on an asp.net site, but this should also work on winform without issues. You just specify the font-file, the font-size and the font-style, and the font-type is returned.

public static LoadedFont LoadFont(FileInfo file, int fontSize, FontStyle fontStyle)
{
    var fontCollection = new PrivateFontCollection();
    fontCollection.AddFontFile(file.FullName);
    if (fontCollection.Families.Length < 0)
    {
        throw new InvalidOperationException("No font familiy found when loading font");
    }

    var loadedFont = new LoadedFont();
    loadedFont.FontFamily = fontCollection.Families[0];
    loadedFont.Font = new Font(loadedFont.FontFamily, fontSize, fontStyle, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
    return loadedFont;
}

LoadedFont is a simple struct

public struct LoadedFont
{
    public Font Font { get; set; }
    public FontFamily FontFamily { get; set; }
}

This is needed to prevent the FontFamily to be GC’ed and the font not working (asp.net, i do not know if it is needed on winform).