Check is font monospace

Question

I have a System.Drawing.Font object. How I can check is that font is monospace? I tried something like font.FontFamily == FontFamily.GenericMonospace, but it's not properly working.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/224865/how-do-i-get-all-installed-fixed-width-fonts — Daniel, Feb 23 '14 at 07:17
GetTextMetrics() is too painful to pinvoke. The simple way is to check if the length of "mmmm" is equal to "iiii". — Hans Passant, Feb 23 '14 at 14:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 20 '20 at 07:41

In C# WPF an easy but a little bit expensive method goes like that:

    private static char[] charSizes = new char[] { 'i', 'a', 'Z', '%', '#', 'a', 'B', 'l', 'm', ',', '.' };

    private bool IsMonospaced(FontFamily family)
    {
        foreach (Typeface typeface in family.GetTypefaces())
        {
            double firstWidth = 0d;

            foreach (char ch in charSizes)
            {
                FormattedText formattedText = new FormattedText(
                    ch.ToString(),
                    CultureInfo.CurrentCulture,
                    FlowDirection.LeftToRight,
                    typeface,
                    10d,
                    Brushes.Black,
                    new NumberSubstitution(),
                    1);
                if (ch == 'i')  // first char in list
                {
                    firstWidth = formattedText.Width;
                }
                else
                {
                    if (formattedText.Width != firstWidth)
                        return false;
                }
            }
        }

        return true;
    }

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 23 '14 at 11:12

Please find the following URL:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5b582b96-ade5-4354-99cf-3fe64cc6b53b/determining-if-font-is-monospaced?forum=winforms

more also on:

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30040/Font-Survey-42-of-the-Best-Monospaced-Programming

Hope this helps.

Check is font monospace

2 Answers2