font-manager

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 font-manager module is via npm:

npm install font-manager

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

sudo apt-get install libfontconfig-dev

API

You load the font-manager module using require as with all Node modules:

var fontManager = require('font-manager');

All of the methods exported by font-manager 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
var 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
var 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
var 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
var 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.

Weights

Widths

License

MIT