Fun with fonts

So I’ve been playing around with the RichTextBox for WPF and decided that it would be a great idea to add font selection to the code. Obviously, this being WPF, I didn’t want to just list the fonts out, I wanted to list the fonts out in exactly the way they’d be displayed. In other words, I want the font name to be written out using the font itself. By now it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that this is extremely easy to do in WPF.

First of all, it’s really easy to get a list of the fonts. .NET provides a handy little class cunningly enough known as InstalledFontCollection, so we’ll wrap that up in a handy list ready for use:

 

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Drawing.Text;
using System.Drawing;

namespace FontManager
{
    public class InstalledFonts : List<FontFamily>
    {
        public InstalledFonts()
        {
            InstalledFontCollection fonts = new InstalledFontCollection();
            this.AddRange(fonts.Families);
        }
    }
}

This class just wraps up the installed font families into a handy dataprovider format. This is all about being nice and blend-friendly.

Next we want to define a usercontrol to display the fonts. Something to note about this control; we display the data in a virtualizing stack panel – if you don’t, you could end up waiting quite a while for the first display of the font.

<UserControl
    x:Class="FontManager.InstalledFontDisplay"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:drawing="clr-namespace:System.Drawing;assembly=System.Drawing"
    xmlns:m="clr-namespace:FontManager"
    xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System.Collections.Generic;assembly=mscorlib"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <UserControl.Resources>
        <Style x:Key="FontStyle">
            <Setter Property="Control.FontFamily" Value="{Binding Name}" />
            <Setter Property="Control.FontSize" Value="16" />
        </Style>
        <DataTemplate x:Key="FontTemplate">
            <StackPanel VirtualizingStackPanel.IsVirtualizing="True">
                <TextBlock
                    Text="{Binding Name}"
                    ToolTip="{Binding Name}"
                    Style="{StaticResource FontStyle}" />
            </StackPanel>
        </DataTemplate>
        <ObjectDataProvider x:Key="FontProvider" ObjectType="{x:Type m:InstalledFonts}"/>
    </UserControl.Resources>
    <ComboBox
            VerticalAlignment="Top"
            ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource FontProvider}}"
            ItemTemplate="{StaticResource FontTemplate}" />

</UserControl>

That’s it – that’s all there is to displaying your font names in the appropriate font. It is so easy, and yet another reason to love WPF. Go on – you know you love it.