Test if a font is installed (Win32)

Question

How can I test if a font is installed?

Ultimately, I want to implement a HTML-like font selection, i.e. when specifying e.g. "Verdana,Arial", it should pick the first font that is installed.

This Question provides an answer for .NET - it seems the recommended way is to create the font, and then cmpare the font face actually used.

Is that the most efficient way?

Answer 1

You can either try to create the font and see what you get (thus using the OS's font name matching/substitution).

Or you can enumerate installed fonts and do that matching yourself.

The "most efficient" way will depend on the details of a "match", and, in all likelihood, how many fonts are installed. On a system with, say, 50 fonts you will probably find performance is significantly different to a system with 1000 fonts installed.

In the end you can only profile on representative systems, if you first approach (keep it simple) turns out to be a performance bottleneck.