fontmanager-redux

A C++ module for Node.js providing access to the system font catalog.

Features

• List all available fonts
• Find fonts with specified characteristics
• Font substitution when characters are missing

Platforms

• Mac OS X 10.5 and later supported via CoreText
• Windows 7 and later supported via DirectWrite
• Linux supported via fontconfig

Installation

Installation of the fontmanager-redux module is via npm:

npm install fontmanager-redux

On Linux, you also may need to install the libfontconfig-dev package, for example:

sudo apt-get install libfontconfig-dev

API

You load the fontmanager-redux module using require as with all Node modules:

import * as fontManager from 'fontmanager-redux';

All of the methods exported by fontmanager-redux have both synchronous and asynchronous versions available. You should generally prefer the asynchronous version as it will allow your program to continue doing other processing while a request for fonts is processing in the background, which may be expensive depending on the platform APIs that are available.

• getAvailableFonts()
• findFonts(fontDescriptor)
• findFont(fontDescriptor)
• substituteFont(postscriptName, text)

getAvailableFonts()

Returns an array of all font descriptors available on the system.

// asynchronous API
fontManager.getAvailableFonts(function(fonts) { ... });

// synchronous API
const fonts = fontManager.getAvailableFontsSync();

// output
[ { path: '/Library/Fonts/Arial.ttf',
    postscriptName: 'ArialMT',
    family: 'Arial',
    style: 'Regular',
    weight: 400,
    width: 5,
    italic: false,
    monospace: false },
  ... ]

findFonts(fontDescriptor)

Returns an array of font descriptors matching a query font descriptor. The returned array may be empty if no fonts match the font descriptor.

// asynchronous API
fontManager.findFonts({ family: 'Arial' }, function(fonts) { ... });

// synchronous API
const fonts = fontManager.findFontsSync({ family: 'Arial' });

// output
[ { path: '/Library/Fonts/Arial.ttf',
    postscriptName: 'ArialMT',
    family: 'Arial',
    style: 'Regular',
    weight: 400,
    width: 5,
    italic: false,
    monospace: false },
  { path: '/Library/Fonts/Arial Bold.ttf',
    postscriptName: 'Arial-BoldMT',
    family: 'Arial',
    style: 'Bold',
    weight: 700,
    width: 5,
    italic: false,
    monospace: false } ]

findFont(fontDescriptor)

Returns a single font descriptors matching a query font descriptors as well as possible. This method always returns a result (never null), so sometimes the output will not exactly match the input font descriptor if not all input parameters could be met.

// asynchronous API
fontManager.findFont({ family: 'Arial', weight: 700 }, function(font) { ... });

// synchronous API
const font = fontManager.findFontSync({ family: 'Arial', weight: 700 });

// output
{ path: '/Library/Fonts/Arial Bold.ttf',
  postscriptName: 'Arial-BoldMT',
  family: 'Arial',
  style: 'Bold',
  weight: 700,
  width: 5,
  italic: false,
  monospace: false }

substituteFont(postscriptName, text)

Substitutes the font with the given postscriptName with another font that contains the characters in text. If a font matching postscriptName is not found, a font containing the given characters is still returned. If a font matching postscriptName is found, its characteristics (bold, italic, etc.) are used to find a suitable replacement. If the font already contains the characters in text, it is not replaced and the font descriptor for the original font is returned.

// asynchronous API
fontManager.substituteFont('TimesNewRomanPSMT', '汉字', function(font) { ... });

// synchronous API
const font = fontManager.substituteFontSync('TimesNewRomanPSMT', '汉字');

// output
{ path: '/Library/Fonts/Songti.ttc',
  postscriptName: 'STSongti-SC-Regular',
  family: 'Songti SC',
  style: 'Regular',
  weight: 400,
  width: 5,
  italic: false,
  monospace: false }

Font Descriptor

Font descriptors are normal JavaScript objects that describe characteristics of a font. They are passed to the findFonts and findFont methods and returned by all of the methods. Any combination of the fields documented below can be used to find fonts, but all methods return full font descriptors.

Name	Type	Description
path	string	The path to the font file in the filesystem. (not applicable for queries, only for results)
postscriptName	string	The PostScript name of the font (e.g 'Arial-BoldMT'). This uniquely identities a font in most cases.
family	string	The font family name (e.g 'Arial')
style	string	The font style name (e.g. 'Bold')
weight	number	The font weight (e.g. 400 for normal weight). Should be a multiple of 100, between 100 and 900. See below for weight documentation.
width	number	The font width (e.g. 5 for normal width). Should be an integer between 1 and 9. See below for width documentation.
italic	boolean	Whether the font is italic or not.
monospace	boolean	Whether the font is monospace or not.

Weights

Value	Name
100	Thin
200	Ultra Light
300	Light
400	Normal
500	Medium
600	Semi Bold
700	Bold
800	Ultra Bold
900	Heavy

Widths

Value	Name
1	Ultra Condensed
2	Extra Condensed
3	Condensed
4	Semi Condensed
5	Normal
6	Semi Expanded
7	Expanded
8	Extra Expanded
9	Ultra Expanded

License

MIT