Class FontSettings

Controls global font-loading behaviour for the drawing library. All properties must be set before the first access to Default because the system font collection is scanned once and cached for the lifetime of the process.

Inheritance

object

FontSettings

Inherited Members

object.Equals(object)

object.Equals(object, object)

object.GetHashCode()

object.GetType()

object.MemberwiseClone()

object.ReferenceEquals(object, object)

object.ToString()

Namespace: DRIT.Drawing.Text

Assembly: DRIT.Drawing.dll

Syntax

public static class FontSettings

Properties

AutoLoadSystemFonts

Gets or sets a value indicating whether InstalledFontCollection automatically loads system fonts on first access. The default is true.

Declaration

public static bool AutoLoadSystemFonts { get; set; }

Property Value

Type	Description
bool

Remarks

When true (the default), Default scans the platform font directories (and optionally native OS APIs) and loads every discovered font. This is the expected behaviour for desktop and console applications.

When false, Default contains only the three generic fallback families (Sans Serif, Serif, Monospace) with guessed metrics. Applications must load fonts manually via PrivateFontCollection. This is recommended for web and server scenarios where:

• Startup latency from scanning hundreds of system fonts is undesirable.
• The server/container has no system fonts installed.
• The application ships its own embedded fonts and wants deterministic behaviour.
• File-system access to font directories is restricted by sandboxing.

This property must be set before the first access to Default. Changes after the collection has been created have no effect.

UseNativeFontApis

Gets or sets a value indicating whether native operating-system APIs are used for font discovery before falling back to directory scanning. The default is true.

Declaration

public static bool UseNativeFontApis { get; set; }

Property Value

Type	Description
bool

Remarks

When true (the default), the library queries the platform's native font service first:

• Windows: reads the font registry keys (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts and the per-user equivalent) to resolve family names to file paths, including fonts installed outside the standard %SYSTEMROOT%\Fonts directory.
• macOS: queries CoreText (CTFontManagerCopyAvailableFontFamilyNames) for the authoritative family list and file paths.
• Linux: queries fontconfig (FcConfigGetFonts) for the authoritative family list and file paths, respecting fontconfig aliases and non-standard install locations.

When false, only directory scanning of the standard font directories is used. This avoids any P/Invoke to native libraries and is useful in restricted environments where native library loading is prohibited.

This property has no effect when AutoLoadSystemFonts is false.