Constructing a Font object in GDI+

This article has been excerpted from book "Graphics Programming with GDI+".

A Font Object belongs to the FontFamily class, so before we construct a font object, we need to construct a FontFamily object. The following code snippet creates two FontFamily objects, belonging to the Verdana and Arial font families, respectively.

            //Create font families
            FontFamily verdanaFamily = new FontFamily("Verdana");
            FontFamily arialFamily = new FontFamily("Arial");

The Font class provide more than a dozen overloaded constructors, which allow an application to construct a Font object in different ways, either from strings names of a font family and size or from a FontFamily object with font style and optinal GraphicsUnit values.

The Simplest way to create a Font object is to pass the font family name as the first argument and the point size as the second argument of the Font constructor. The following code snippet creates a Times New Roman 12-point font:

            Font tnwFont = new Font ("Times New Roman", 12);

The following code snippet creates three fonts in different styles belonging to the Verdana, Tahoma, and Arial font families, respectively.

        //Construct Font objects
        FontFamily verdanaFamily = new FontFamily("Verdana");
        FontFamily arialFamily = new FontFamily("Arial");
        Font VerdanaFont = new Font (verdanaFamily, 14,
        FontStyle.Regular, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
        Font tahomaFont = new Font (new FontFamily ("Tahoma"), 10,
        FontStyle.Bold|FontStyle.Italic, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
        Font arialFont = new Font (arialFamily, 16, FontStyle.Bold,
        GraphicsUnit.Point);
        Font tnFont = new Font("Times New Roman", 12);

Note: As the code example here shows, you can use the FontStyle and GraphicsUnit enumeration to define the style and units of a font, respectively.

If you don't want to create and use a FontFamily object in constructing a font, you can pass the font family name and size directly when you create a new Font object. The following code snippet creates three fonts from the Verdana, Arial, and Tahoma font families, respectively, with different sizes and styles.

//Construct Font objects
Font verdanaFont = new Font ("Verdana", 12);
Font arialFont = new Font ("Arial", 10);
Font tahomaFont = new Font ("Arial", 14, FontStyle.Underline | FontStyle.Italic);

Conclusion

Hope the article would have helped you in understanding Constructing a Font object in GDI+. Read other articles on GDI+ on the website.

This book teaches .NET developers how to work with GDI+ as they develop applications that include graphics, or that interact with monitors or printers. It begins by explaining the difference between GDI and GDI+, and covering the basic concepts of graphics programming in Windows.