Advanced MFC Programming

Chapter 9. Font
Chapter 9
Font
Font is another very important GDI object, every application deals with font. Usually a system
contains some default fonts that can be used by all the applications. Besides these default fonts, we
can also install fonts provided by the thirty party. For word processing applications, using font is a
complex issue. There are many things we need to take care. For example, when creating this type of
applications, we need to think about the following issues: how to display a font with different styles; how to
change the text alignment; how to add special effects to characters.
9.1 Outputting Text Using Different Fonts
When we implement a font dialog box, all the available fonts contained in the system will be listed in
it. We can select font size, font name, special styles, and text color.
Like other GDI objects such as pen and brush, we need to create font with specific styles and select it
into a DC in order to use it for outputting text. In MFC, the class that can be used to implement font is
CFont. To create a font, we can call either CFont::CreateFont(…) or CFont::CreateFontIndirect(…),
whose formats are listed as follows:
BOOL CFont::CreateFont
(
int nHeight, int nWidth,
int nEscapement, int nOrientation, int nWeight,
BYTE bItalic, BYTE bUnderline, BYTE cStrikeOut,
BYTE nCharSet, BYTE nOutPrecision, BYTE nClipPrecision, BYTE nQuality,
BYTE nPitchAndFamily, LPCTSTR lpszFacename
);
BOOL CFont::CreateFontIndirect(const LOGFONT *lpLogFont);
The first function has many parameters and the second one needs only a LOGFONT type pointer. The
results of the two member functions are exactly the same, every style we need to specify for a font in the
first function has a corresponding member in structure LOGFONT:
typedef struct tagLOGFONT{
LONG lfHeight;
LONG lfWidth;
LONG lfEscapement;
LONG lfOrientation;
LONG lfWeight;
BYTE lfItalic;
BYTE lfUnderline;
BYTE lfStrikeOut;
BYTE lfCharSet;
BYTE lfOutPrecision;
BYTE lfClipPrecision;
BYTE lfQuality;
BYTE lfPitchAndFamily;
TCHAR lfFaceName[LF_FACESIZE];
} LOGFONT;
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