Finding System Fonts with Delphi

Question

What is the best way to find all the system fonts a user has available so they can be displayed in a dropdown selection box?

I would also like to distinguish between Un

Answer 1

I can answer half your question, you can get a list of the Fonts that your current environment has access to as a string list from the global Screen object

i.e.

Listbox1.Items.AddStrings(Screen.Fonts);

Answer 2

You can look in the forms.pas source to see how Codegear fill Screen.Fonts by enumerating the Windows fonts. The returned LOGFONT structure has a charset member, but this does not provide a simple 'Unicode' determination.

As far as I know Windows cannot tell you explicitly if a font is 'Unicode'. Moreover if you try to display Unicode text in a 'non-Unicode' font Windows may substitute a different font, so it is difficult to say whether a font will or will not display Unicode. For example I have an ancient Arial Black font file which contains no Unicode glyphs, but if I use this to display Japanese text in a D2009 memo, the Japanese shows up correctly in Arial and the rest in Arial Black. In other examples, the usual empty squares may show up.

Answer 3

The Screen.Fonts property is populated via the EnumFontFamiliesEx API function. Look in Forms.pas for an example of calling that function.

The callback function that it calls will receive a TNewTextMetricEx record, and one of the members of that record is a TFontSignature. The fsUsb field indicates which Unicode subranges the font claims to support.

The system doesn't actually have "Unicode fonts." Even the fonts that have the word Unicode in their names don't have glyphs for all Unicode characters. You can distinguish between bitmap, printer, and TrueType fonts, but beyond that, the best you can do is to figure out whether the font you're considering supports the characters you want. And if the font isn't what you'd consider a "Unicode font," but it supports all the characters you need, then what difference does it make? To get this information, you may be interested in GetFontUnicodeRanges.

The Microsoft technology for displaying text with different fonts based on which fonts contain which characters is Uniscribe, particularly font fallback. I'm not aware of any Delphi support for Uniscribe; I started writing a set of import units for it once, but my interests are fickle, and I moved on to something else before I completed it. Michael Kaplan's blog talks about Uniscribe sometimes, so that's another place to look.