Special Font Selection Considerations

Although most font selection operations involve the user, there are some instances where this is not true. For example, a developer may want to use a unique font in an application to draw text in a control window. To select an appropriate font, the application must be able to determine what fonts are available, create a logical font that describes one of these available fonts, and then select that font into the appropriate device context.

An application can enumerate the available fonts by using the EnumFontFamilies function. This can be useful when an application must determine which fonts are available from a given family.

Once an application has enumerated the available fonts and located an appropriate match, it should use the values returned by the font enumeration function to initialize the members of a LOGFONT structure. Then it can call the CreateFontIndirect function, passing to it a pointer to the initialized LOGFONT structure. If the CreateFontIndirect function is successful, the application can then select the logical font by calling the SelectObject function.

When initializing the members of the LOGFONT structure, be sure to specify a specific character set in the lfCharSet member. This member is important in the font mapping process and the results will be inconsistent if this member is not initialized correctly. If you specify a typeface name in the lfFaceName member of the LOGFONT structure, make sure that the lfCharSet value matches the character set of the typeface specified in lfFaceName. For example, if you want to select a font such as "MS Mincho", lfCharSet must be set to the predefined value SHIFTJIS_CHARSET.