Re: Listing fonts

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Andrea Frome <andrea@bluemug.com> writes:
> I'm working on porting an application from Motif to Gtk, and I'm
> surprised to find that there isn't a method analogous to
> XListFonts() in Gdk for listing the fonts available on the
> system.  I understand that I could just make a call to XListFonts()
> (this is what the GtkFontSelection widget does), but I'm trying to 
> make the ported application independent of X.
> 
> Is there a reason this functionality wasn't included in Gdk? 

Because GDK 1.2 doesn't have a useful cross-platform way to represent
a listed font. The result would have to be an XLFD, and that's not
portable, so you may as well use XListFonts().

>  How do people usually work around this?  Are there plans to provide
> a wrapper function in the next release?
> 

Yes, GDK 1.4 uses Pango (http://www.pango.org) which has a nice
cross-platform cross-font-system representation for fonts
(PangoFontDescription).

I'm guessing you would call pango_context_list_families() or
pango_context_list_fonts(), and there will be a function
gtk_widget_get_pango_context() to conveniently get a context. See
http://www.pango.org/api/pango-text-processing.html for details.

Havoc