List of installed fonts OS X / C

Question

I'm trying to programatically get a list of installed fonts in C or Python. I need to be able to do this on OS X, does anyone know how?

Answer 1

Do you want to write a program to do it, or do you want to use a program to do it? There are many programs that list fonts, xlsfonts comes to mind.

Answer 2

Not exactly C, but in Objective-C, you can easily get a list of installed fonts via the Cocoa framework:

// This returns an array of NSStrings that gives you each font installed on the system
NSArray *fonts = [[NSFontManager sharedFontManager] availableFontFamilies];

// Does the same as the above, but includes each available font style (e.g. you get
// Verdana, "Verdana-Bold", "Verdana-BoldItalic", and "Verdana-Italic" for Verdana).
NSArray *fonts = [[NSFontManager sharedFontManager] availableFonts];

You can access the Cocoa framework from Python via PyObjC, if you want.

In C, I think you can do something similar in Carbon with the ATSUI library, although I'm not entirely sure how to do this, since I haven't worked with fonts in Carbon before. Nevertheless, from browsing the ATSUI docs, I'd recommend looking into the ATSUGetFontIDs and the ATSUGetIndFontName functions. Here's a link to the ATSUI documentation for more information.

Answer 3

You can get an array of available fonts using Objective-C and Cocoa. The method you are looking for is NSFontManager's availableFonts.

I don't believe there is a standard way to determine what the system fonts are using pure C. However, you can freely mix C and Objective-C, so it really shouldn't be to hard to use this method to do what you'd like.

Answer 4

Why not use the Terminal?

System Fonts:

ls -R /System/Library/Fonts | grep ttf

User Fonts:

ls -R ~/Library/Fonts | grep ttf

Mac OS X Default fonts:

ls -R /Library/Fonts | grep ttf

If you need to run it inside your C program:

void main()
{ 
    printf("System fonts: ");
    execl("/bin/ls","ls -R /System/Library/Fonts | grep ttf", "-l",0);
    printf("Mac OS X Default fonts: ");
    execl("/bin/ls","ls -R /Library/Fonts | grep ttf", "-l",0);
    printf("User fonts: ");
    execl("/bin/ls","ls -R ~/Library/Fonts | grep ttf", "-l",0);
}

Answer 5

Python with PyObjC installed (which is the case for Mac OS X 10.5+, so this code will work without having to install anything):

import Cocoa
manager = Cocoa.NSFontManager.sharedFontManager()
font_families = list(manager.availableFontFamilies())

(based on htw's answer)