Question

Why the following code does not throw an exception?

FontFamily font = new FontFamily("bla bla bla");

I need to know if a specific font (as combination of FontFamily, FontStyle, FontWeight, …) exists in my current OS. How have I to do?

Answer 1

This is by design. Programs frequently ask for fonts that are not present on the machine, especially in a country far flung from the programmer’s domicile. The font mapper produces an alternative. Font substitution is in general very common. You are looking at Arial right now if you are on a Windows machine. But I can paste 你好世界 into this post and you’ll see it render accurately, even though Arial doesn’t have glyphs for Chinese characters.

So hint number one is to not actually worry about what fonts are available. The Windows api has EnumFontFamiliesEx() to enumerate available font families. But that’s not exposed in WPF, some friction with OpenType there, a font standard that’s rather poorly integrated with Windows. Another shadow cast when Adobe gets involved with anything Microsoft does, it seems.

Some confusion in the comments about Winforms’ FontFamily class. Which is actually usable in this case, its GetFamilies() method returns an array of available families. But only TrueType, not OpenType fonts.