Tip 189: Determining Which Screen and Printer Fonts Are Available

December 5, 1995

Abstract

When displaying text in a Microsoft® Visual Basic® application, you may want to specify which fonts are assigned to the text on the screen and the text sent to the printer. This article explains how you can retrieve a list of screen fonts and a list of printer fonts currently installed on your computer system.

Retrieving Lists of Installed Screen and Printer Fonts

The Fonts collection provided in Microsoft® Visual Basic® is a list of the names of all fonts installed in the Microsoft Windows® operating system. You can retrieve a specific font by specifying an index value with a statement such as:

X$ = Screen.Fonts(2)

Note that you cannot modify the Fonts property of an object but can only ask which font is currently being used.

The Fonts collection exists for both the Screen object and the Printer object, which both have a FontCount property. The FontCount property indicates exactly how many fonts for that particular object are available.

You can create a list of all available fonts by interrogating the items contained in the Fonts collection. In the example program below, a For-Next loop retrieves each font's name from the Fonts collection. The routine ends when the maximum number of installed fonts (FontCount - 1) has been reached.

Example Program

This program shows how to retrieve a list of all printer and screen fonts installed in the computer system.

1. Create a new project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default.
   
   
2. Add a List Box control to Form1. List1 is created by default.
   
   
3. Add a Command Button control to Form1. Command1 is created by default.
   
   
4. Add the following code to the Click event for Command1:

   Private Sub Command1_Click()
       List1.Clear
       Dim X As Integer
       For X = 0 To Printer.FontCount - 1
           List1.AddItem Printer.Fonts(X)
       Next X
   End Sub
   

5. Add a second Command Button control to Form1. Command2 is created by default.
   
   
6. Add the following code to the Click event for Command2:

   Private Sub Command2_Click()
       List1.Clear
       Dim X As Integer
       For X = 0 To Screen.FontCount - 1
           List1.AddItem Screen.Fonts(X)
       Next X
   End Sub
   

Run the example program by pressing F5. Click the first Command Button control. A list of all printer fonts appears in the List Box control. Click the second Command Button control. A list of all screen fonts appears in the List Box control.