How to Display Fonts in MFC

The Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library lets a programmer plan the font display of an application through the CFont class. CFont encapsulates all font manipulation techniques, and the class provides four member functions for creating fonts. The following steps demonstrate by example each function and the input parameters it accepts.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Book on MFC, such as "Programming Windows With MFC" by Jeff Prosise

1. Demonstrate all CFont functions (CreateFont, CreateFontIndirect, CreatePointFont and CreatePointFontIndirect) in the same context. You can use Steps 2 to 5 to create an MFC CFont object, give the object parameters through the member function in question, apply the object to a device context and delete the object.

2. Display the use of the "CreateFont" function:

   //define an MFC device context CClientDC DC(this); //create a CFont object CFont font; //assign parameters font.CreateFont(11, 0, 0, 0, FW_NORMAL, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, 0, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS, CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, DEFAULT_QUALITY, DEFAULT_PITCH | FF_ROMAN, "Times New Roman"); CFont* pFont = DC.SelectObject(&font); DC.TextOut(5, 5, "Hello World", 10); //apply settings of CFont object to device context DC.SelectObject(pFont); //delete object font.DeleteObject();

3. Demonstrate the usage of CreateFontIndirect():

   //define a device context CClientDC dc(this); //create a CFont object CFont font; LOGFONT logFont; logFont.lfHeight = 11; strcpy(logFont.lfFaceName, "Arial"); //assign parameters font.CreateFontIndirect(&logFont); CFont* pFont = dc.SelectObject(&font); dc.TextOut(5, 5, "Hello World", 10); //apply settings of CFont object to device context dc.SelectObject(pFont); //delete object font.DeleteObject();

4. Illustrate the "CreatePointFont" function:

   //define an MFC device context CClientDC dc(this); //create a CFont object CFont font; font.CreatePointFont(120,"Times New Roman"); //assign parameters CFont* pFont = dc.SelectObject(&font); dc.TextOut(5, 5, "Hello World", 10); //apply settings of CFont object to device context dc.SelectObject(pFont); //delete object font.DeleteObject();

5. Give an example to display the "CreatePointFontIndirect" function:

   //define a device context CClientDC dc(this); //create a CFont object CFont font; LOGFONT logFont; logFont.lfHeight = 140; strcpy(logFont.lfFaceName, "New Times Roman"); //assign parameters font.CreatePointFontIndirect(&logFont); //apply settings of CFont object to device context CFont* pFont = dc.SelectObject(&font); dc.TextOut(5, 5, "Hello World", 10); dc.SelectObject(pFont); font.DeleteObject()

Tips & Warnings

• There is more to the CFont class than the scope of this article can cover. For full coverage, consult the MSDN Library.

Resources

• The MSDN Library, a resource for Microsoft technologies.
• DevCentral offers articles, tutorials and examples.
• Code Beach offers free source code and tutorials for C++.