A possibly partial description of font(s).

Create a new font description.

• All field are unset.

Make a deep copy of a font description.

Set the font famliy.

• A font family is a name designating the design of the font (e.g. Sans or Times) without the variant.
• In some contexts a comma separated list of font families can be used.

Get the font family.

• Nothing is returned if the font family is not set.

Set the style field.

• Most fonts will have either a StyleItalic or StyleOblique but rarely both.

Get the style field.

Set the variant field.

Get the variant field.

Set the weight field.

Get the weight field.

Set the stretch field.

Get the stretch field.

Set the size field.

• The given size is in points (pts). One point is 1/72 inch.

Get the size field.

Flags denoting which fields in a font description are set.

Reset fields in a font description.

Merge two font descriptions.

• Copy fields from the second description to the first. If the boolean parameter is set, existing fields in the first description will be replaced.

Determine which of two descriptions matches a given description better.

• Returns True if the last description is a better match to the first argument than the middle one.
• Approximate matching is done on weight and style. If the other attributes do not match, the function returns False.

Create a font description from a string.

• The given argument must have the form [FAMILY-LIST] [STYLE-OPTIONS] [SIZE] where FAMILY_LIST is a comma separated list of font families optionally terminated by a comma, STYLE_OPTIONS is a whitespace separated list of words where each word describes one of style, variant, weight or stretch. SIZE is a decimal number giving the size of the font in points. If any of these fields is absent, the resulting FontDescription will have the corresponding fields unset.

Convert a font description to a string.

• Creates a string representation of a font description. See fontDescriptionFromString for the format of the string.

Ask for the different font families that a particular back-end supports.

• The FontMap can be acquired by calling cairoFontMapGetDefault.

Ask if the given family contains monospace fonts.

• A monospace font is a font designed for text display where the characters form a regular grid. For Western languages this would mean that the advance width of all characters are the same, but this categorization also includes Asian fonts which include double-width characters: characters that occupy two grid cells.
• The best way to find out the grid-cell size is to query the members of the according FontMetrics structure.

Ask for the faces contained in a particular family.

• Asks for all font faces in the given family. The faces in a family share a common design, but differ in slant, weight, width and other aspects. For example, the font family Sans contains several fonts such as Helvetica and Arial.

Ask for available sizes of this font face.

• List the available sizes for a font. This is only applicable to bitmap fonts since all other fonts can be scaled arbitrarily. For scalable fonts, this function returns Nothing. The sizes returned are in ascending order, their unit is points (1/72 inch).

Ask for a description of this face.

• Returns the family, style, variant, weight and stretch of a FontFace. The size field of the resulting font description will be unset.