Question

Why the FontFamily param of the Font object is a string and not an enum?

Answer 1

FontFamily refers to the name of the Font. While you could use ‘monospace’ or ‘serif’ I wouldn’t think it would be supported by .Net.

Remember, using a enum would be impossible. A enum is a static compile-time feature, which means that it can’t ‘generate’ a enum dynamically from fonts on your system. Indeed, including anything this specific in a language would probably be a poor idea. Even if this was supported, the user’s machine wouldn’t have the same fonts as yours – some fonts would be incorrectly included in the list and some excluded (because once compiled an enum becomes ‘final’).

Enums are a convenient store of integral constants and NOTHING else. Each item in a enum has a convenient name and a value, even if you don’t specify it. The following two enums are the same.

public enum MyEnum {   A = 1,   B = 2 }  public enum FooEnum {   A,   B } 

And there are two other problems, enum names can not contain spaces, where font names can. Getting the fields from an enum is not a trivial task (it requires a lot of reflection code).

The following code will get you a list of fonts (you will need to add System.Drawing as a reference):

    using System;     using System.Collections.Generic;     using System.Linq;     using System.Text;     using System.Drawing.Text;     using System.Drawing;      namespace ConsoleApplication19     {         class Program         {             static void Main(string[] args)             {                 InstalledFontCollection ifc = new InstalledFontCollection();                  foreach (FontFamily o in ifc.Families)                 {                     Console.WriteLine(o.Name);                 }                 Console.ReadLine();             }         }     }