I'm looking for the list of "safe" font families to use in a WPF application - font families that should be installed on all clients machines capable of running WPF. Silverlight has a well defined list of such (listed on MSDN it comes with 25 fonts such as Arial, Arial Black, Calibri etc).
Is there such a list for WPF or will I have to embed custom fonts to make sure all users of the application will see the same font type?
You can find a list of all fonts that ship with any given Microsoft product on the MS Typography website ("Fonts by Product"):
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/
WPF 4 requires at least Windows XP SP3 with IE 5.01, so the fonts you can count on are the following:
- Aharoni - Andalus - AngsanaUPC - Angsana New - Arabic Transparent - Arial - Arial Black - Batang - BrowalliaUPC - Browallia New - Comic Sans MS - CordiaUPC - Cordia New - Courier New - David - DFKai-SB - DilleniaUPC - Estrangelo Edessa - EucrosiaUPC - Fixed Miriam Transparent - Franklin Gothic - FrankRuehl - FreesiaUPC - Gautami - Georgia - Gulim - Impact - IrisUPC - JasmineUPC - KaiTi - Kartika - KodchiangUPC - Latha - Levenim MT - LilyUPC - Lucida Console - Lucida Sans - Lucida Sans Unicode - Mangal - Marlett - Microsoft Sans Serif - PMingLiU - Miriam - Miriam Fixed - MS Gothic - MS Mincho - MV Boli - Narkisim - Palatino Linotype - PMingLiU-ExtB - Raavi - Rod - Shruti - SimHei - Simplified Arabic Fixed - Simplified Arabic Fixed - SimSun-ExtB - Sylfaen - Symbol - Tahoma - Times New Roman - Traditional Arabic - Trebuchet MS - Tunga - Verdana - Vrinda - Webdings - Wingdings
(based on filtering this list)
However, these pages note that some fonts might not be installed. I think Asian scripts are generally not installed unless needed -- perhaps someone else knows the details here?
There is a way simpler way to list all the default fonts.
using System.Windows.Media;
//...
//Somewhere inside the window's class (e.g. constructor)
var fontList = Fonts.SystemFontFamilies;
You can also then bind this to a ComboBox like so:
//...Inside of window constructor
this.DataContext = fontList
Here you can find more details: http://vbcity.com/blogs/xtab/archive/2009/11/30/wpf-how-to-list-select-and-apply-fonts.aspx
As @Chris says, the updated reference link of Microsoft Fonts and supported products is this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/index
Your choice should be based on your target framework version, I'm not sure you can find a 100% safe font...
