list-fonts-json

This is a tiny cross-platform utility which simply lists the available installed fonts in a JSON format to stdout.

This code is derived from the font-manager NodeJS module, but makes it a separate executable and not a node module which needs to be rebuilt everytime you install it or change node versions. It is quite simple and only implements font-manager's getAvailableFonts() method.

Example output:

[
  {
    "path": "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/NotoSansDisplay-Bold.ttf",
    "postscriptName": "NotoSansDisplay-Bold",
    "family": "Noto Sans Display",
    "style": "Bold",
    "weight": 700,
    "width": 5,
    "italic": false,
    "oblique": false,
    "monospace": true
  }
]

The output is a JSON array of objects where each object describes a font with the following fields:

path - The path to the font file on the file system.
postscriptName - The PostScript name of the font.
family - The name of the font.
style - The general style of the font.
weight - The weight or thickness of the font. This number ranges from 100 for very thin, to 400 for normal, up to 900 for maximum heavy.
width - The width of the font. This number ranges from 1 for ultra condensed, to 5 for normal, up to 9 for ultra expanded.
italic - (boolean) Whether the font is an italic font.
oblique - (boolean) Whether the font is oblique.
monospace - (boolean) Whether the font is monospace.

Note that italic, oblique and monospace fields tend not to be reliablely reported by most operating systems.

Platforms

Mac OS X 10.5 and later supported via CoreText
Windows 7 and later supported via DirectWrite
Linux supported via fontconfig

Build

The build system is based on CMake. Make sure you have a recent version installed.

macOS

Make sure you have Xcode's C/C++ compiler installed, and then from the root of this git repository run:

  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
  make

The executable is left in the build folder.

Linux

First ensure you have a working C/C++ compiler and the fontconfig development files installed. Now run:

  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
  make

The executable is left in the build directory.

Linux in Docker

It is also possible to build the Linux binary via Docker. That advantage is that you don't need any extra tooling installed and the resulting executable should have greater compatibilitywith older Linux distributions.

Run the script:

  ./build_linux_in_docker.sh

The executable is left in the build directory.

Windows

Make sure you have CMake installed and a "Visual Studio Visual C/C++ Build Tools 2015" or similar installed.

From PowerShell run:

  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ..

Now open up a suitable "Visual C/C++ 2015 x64 Native Build Tools Command Promp", go to the build directory and run:

    msbuild ALL_BUILD.vcxproj /p:Configuration=Release

The exe should now be in the Release/ directory.

License

MIT

Simon Edwards simon@simonzone.com

chm-dev / list-fonts-json