Enumerate Installed Fonts

Is it possible to enumerate the installed fonts on a device using .NET
CF 2? On the desktop you can simply use the InstalledFontCollection
object but this is unavailable on the Compact Framework.

Thanks!

j

---
http://csharponphone.blogspot.com/

On Mar 3, 9:15 am, "jonfroehlich" <jonfroehl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to enumerate the installed fonts on a device using .NET
> CF 2? On the desktop you can simply use the InstalledFontCollection
> object but this is unavailable on the Compact Framework.
>
> Thanks!
>
> j
>
> ---http://csharponphone.blogspot.com/

The good news is yes, it is possible. I haven't tried it myself, but
I've seen mentions of how to do so.

You need to make use of the native Win32 EnumFontFamilies function
(documented at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms901123.aspx
). Notice that one of the parameters is a FONTENUMPROC. This is a
callback function that you need to supply to EnumFontFamilies. Each
time EnumFontFamilies finds a font, it calls your callback and passes
in the information about the font.

Under CF 1.0, it was effectively impossible to use this function,
since CF 1.0 didn't support native callbacks. Happily, CF 2.0 did add
that support. The trick is to create a delegate whose signature
matches that of FONTENUMPROC and create a C# function that matches the
delegate. Then, when you write the P/Invoke definition for
EnumFontFamilies, replace FONTENUMPROC with IntPtr. Finally, use
Marshal.CreateFunctionPointerForDelegate(myCallbackFunction) and pass
the result to EnumFontFamilies.

I dug up a couple of links that ought to help demonstrate things:

In the first one, a guy was trying to do this under the desktop
framework and couldn't quite get it to work. Not sure why he had
problems, but it looks like most of his code is usable. That's at
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...91baad463f5b9e6
..

The second link is a sample for how to use EnumFontFamilies from
within VB6, available at http://vbnet.mvps.org/index.html?co...s/enumfonts.htm
..

Again, I haven't actually tried this out myself, but I'm pretty sure
it's correct based on what I've read. If nothing else, it oughta get
you pointed in the right direction.

Hope this helps!

Mark Erikson
http://www.isquaredsoftware.com