Hi Howard,

Thanks for your posting. As for the adding new font problem you mentioned,
I've done some tests on my side and it seems that the .net can detect the
new added system fonts (in the windows(winnt)/fonts folder) without restart
the computer. In fact, the .net do cache the system font collection but
that's only during the lifecyle of a .net application(appdomain). When you
restart the application, and access the system fonts again, the changes
should be reflected in the new  AppDomain. To verify this, you can create a
simple winform application and add the following code:

System.Drawing.Text.InstalledFontCollection ifc = new
InstalledFontCollection();
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

foreach (FontFamily fm in ifc.Families)
{
    sb.Append("\t" + fm.Name );
   
}

MessageBox.Show(sb.ToString());

the InstalledFontCollection.Families contains all the currently installed
True Type fonts  under the system fonts folder.  You can run the code after
you install your custom font to see whether it display in the collection.  
If that shows the new added font,  the .net has correctly detect the new
font, we may need to do some further shoot in the code we use the font.

In addition, we can also use the System.Drawing.Text.PrivateFontCollection
to use a custom True Type Font(.ttf) without installing it into the system
fonts( as a temporary font).  For example:

#the following code use a Custom font to draw some string into a image and
output to a web page. The custom font isn't added to the system , we
directly use it via locating its "ttf" file.

================================
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        System.Drawing.Text.PrivateFontCollection  pfc = new
PrivateFontCollection();
       
                               //locate the font family's ttf file
                               
pfc.AddFontFile(Server.MapPath("DarkGardenMK.ttf"));
           
        FontFamily family=new FontFamily("Dark Garden",pfc);
        Font dgFont=new Font(family,40);

        Bitmap tmpBitmap = new Bitmap(400,100,PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
        Graphics objGraphics = Graphics.FromImage(tmpBitmap);
               
               
        objGraphics.DrawString("Hello World!", dgFont, new SolidBrush(Color.White
),0,0);

        Response.Clear();
        Response.ContentType = "image/jpeg";
        tmpBitmap.Save(Response.OutputStream,ImageFormat.Jpeg);

        Response.End();
        tmpBitmap.Dispose();

    }
    catch(Exception ex)
    {
        Response.Write("<br>" + ex.Message);
    }
           
}

==================================

This will be very useful when we don't want to install a certain custom
font into the system and still able to use it in our own application.  Hope
also helps. Thanks.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

Instead of installing fonts, a much better and clean option is to embed font
in the assembly and dynamically load it. You never have to bother with font
installation anymore. Plus you dont have to deal with all those problems
that you have mentioned.

Let me know if you need code.

Ali

Hello howard39@nospam.nospam,