Selecting a Font

Every presentation space has a current font, and graphics characters must be drawn in that font. By default, the current font is the system font. Before an application can use any font other than the system font, it has to identify the other font as the new current font.

There are two distinct ways to identify the other font:

• Call GpiQueryFonts to request information about the available physical fonts, and then explicitly select one of those fonts by supplying its identifier as input to GpiCreateLogFont.

  This process has 11 steps and is covered in the topic "Explicit Font Selection." This method of selecting a font is most useful for selecting image fonts.

  If you must have an image font, you are urged to use this "explicit selection"method, because you need to specify a maximum baseline extent and an average character width in the FATTRS structure. These values can be determined only by calling GpiQueryFonts. If you specify values that are not valid, you are likely to be given an outline font.

• Use GpiCreateLogFont to specify the features you require in a font, and permit the PM programming interface to make an appropriate font available to you.

  This process has two steps and is covered in the topic "Closest Matching Font Selection."