Get a font filename based on Font Name and Style (Bold/Italic)

Question

This has been driving me crazy all day.

I need to get a font filename (eg. Arial.ttf) based on its name (Arial in this case) and whether it is bold, italic or both. Using those pieces of information, I need to find the font file so I can use it for rendering.

Some more examples:

• Calibri, Bold would resolve to calibrib.ttf.
• Calibri, Italic would resolve to calibrii.ttf.

Any ideas on how I could achieve this in C++ (Win32)

Answer 1

First, to my knowledge, there is no reliable way to do that.

The Windows API deals with font families and mappings, not with font files, which are dealt with at a lower level. Also note that even if you manage to get the file name of a font, no rendering function (that I know of) will accept it, so what will you do with it?

That said, you can look in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts in order to obtain the file name of a font from its logical name. An implementation of that solution can be found here.