Load And Use Custom Font Without Installing It

Introduction

How can you load and use fonts that are not installed in the system? Your application does not always have enough rights to install custom font into system. For example in ClickOnce application.

Background

I wrote an application for ClickOnce install. My application requires a custom font. How could I use custom font without administrator privileges? I looked at the MSDN documentation, found class PrivateFontCollection and saw a beautiful example. Three seconds and I had a few lines of code in my app. But nothing happened. Custom font didn't appear!

Ok, I wrote a test program, and used a complete example from MSDN. Same result! Looking at the example, I saw used font names - Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman... Why am I not surprised that this example works? Cause these fonts are preinstalled in the system. Only a complete idiot will delete these fonts!

I searched the internet and saw something about SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault method of Application. Visual Studio by default sets this method to false but for rumors should be true. I tried, but still got nothing.

More Googling and I saw similar examples, the only difference was that the new Font was created using FontFamily, but not by face name, as in the MSDN sample.

Solution

I tried to use FontFamily received from PrivateFontCollection and gotcha! The result is fine! If I don't forget, I will send feedback to MSDN. (Update: Already sent)

Sample

Create an empty Windows Forms project, add label on form. Add Form.OnLoad handler, add the following lines:

PrivateFontCollection pfc = new PrivateFontCollection();
pfc.AddFontFile("C:\\Path To\\PALETX3.ttf");
label1.Font = new Font(pfc.Families[0], 16, FontStyle.Regular);

Result