

# systemfonts 

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systemfonts is a package that locates installed fonts. It uses the
system-native libraries on Mac (CoreText) and Linux (FontConfig), and
uses Freetype to parse the fonts in the registry on Windows.

## Installation

systemfonts is available from CRAN using
`install.packages('systemfonts')`. It is however still under development
and you can install the development version using devtools.

``` r
# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('r-lib/systemfonts')
```

## Examples

The main use of this package is to locate font files based on family and
style:

``` r
library(systemfonts)

match_fonts('Avenir', italic = TRUE)
#>                               path index features variations
#> 1 /System/Library/Fonts/Avenir.ttc     1
```

This function returns the path to the file holding the font, as well as
the 0-based index of the font in the file.

It is also possible to get a data.frame of all available fonts:

``` r
system_fonts()
#> # A tibble: 1,221 × 10
#>    path          index name  family style weight width italic monospace variable
#>    <chr>         <int> <chr> <chr>  <chr> <ord>  <ord> <lgl>  <lgl>     <lgl>   
#>  1 /Users/thoma…     0 Recu… Recur… Sans… medium norm… FALSE  FALSE     TRUE    
#>  2 /Users/thoma…     0 Syne… Syne   Regu… normal norm… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#>  3 /Users/thoma…     0 Inpu… Input… Extr… light  cond… TRUE   TRUE      FALSE   
#>  4 /System/Libr…     1 Telu… Telug… Bold  bold   norm… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#>  5 /Users/thoma…     0 Inpu… Input… Thin  light  semi… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#>  6 /System/Libr…     0 Micr… Micro… Regu… normal norm… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#>  7 /Users/thoma…     0 Fira… Fira … Bold  bold   norm… FALSE  TRUE      FALSE   
#>  8 /System/Libr…     0 Sukh… Sukhu… Thin  ultra… semi… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#>  9 /System/Libr…     0 Sathu Sathu  Regu… normal norm… FALSE  FALSE     FALSE   
#> 10 /Users/thoma…     0 IBMP… IBM P… Text… normal norm… TRUE   FALSE     FALSE   
#> # ℹ 1,211 more rows
```

Further, you can query additional information about fonts and specific
glyphs, if that is of interest using the `font_info()` and
`glyph_info()` functions.

### Custom fonts

While the package was created to provide transparent access to fonts
installed on the system, it has grown to also provide ways to work with
font files not part of the system installation. This is especially
beneficial if you are running code on a system where you don’t have
administrator rights and need to use a custom font.

systemfonts provide the `add_fonts()` function which takes a vector of
file paths and add these to the lookup database without installing them.
Further, systemfonts automatically looks in the `./fonts` and `~/fonts`
folders and adds any font files located there during startup. This means
that you can distribute a script along with a fonts directory and have
those fonts automatically available during execution of the script.

In addition to the above, systemfonts also provides access to online
font repositories such as [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com) and
can search and download from these, automatically adding the downloaded
fonts to the lookup database.

All these functionalities are condensed into a single function,
`require_font()`, which allows you to state a font dependency inside a
script. The function will first look for the font on the system, and
failing that, will try to fetch it from an online repository. If that
fails it will either throw an error or remap the font to another of the
developers choosing.

## C API

While getting this information in R is nice, the intended use is mostly
through compiled code so that graphic devices can easily locate relevant
font files etc.

In order to use functions from systemfonts in C(++) code your package
should list systemfonts in the `LinkingTo` field in the `DESCRIPTION`
file. Once this is done you can now `#include <systemfonts.h>` in your
code and use the provided functions. Look into the
[`inst/include/systemfonts.h`](https://github.com/r-lib/systemfonts/blob/master/inst/include/systemfonts.h)
file to familiarise yourself with the C API.

## System Defaults

systemfonts will always try to find a font for you, even if none exist
with the given family name or style. How it resolves this is system
specific and should not be relied on, but it can be expected that a
valid font file is always returned no matter the input.

A few special aliases exist that behaves predictably but system
dependent:

- `""` and `"sans"` return *Helvetica* on Mac, *Arial* on Windows, and
  the default sans-serif font on Linux (*DejaVu Sans* on Ubuntu)
- `"serif"` return *Times* on Mac, *Times New Roman* on Windows, and the
  default serif font on Linux (*DejaVu Serif* on Ubuntu)
- `"mono"` return *Courier* on Mac, *Courier New* on Windows, and the
  default mono font on Linux (*DejaVu Mono* on Ubuntu)
- `"emoji"` return *Apple Color Emoji* on Mac, *Segoe UI Emoji* on
  Windows, and the default emoji font on Linux (*Noto Color* on Ubuntu)

## Code of Conduct

Please note that the ‘systemfonts’ project is released with a
[Contributor Code of
Conduct](https://github.com/r-lib/systemfonts/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).
By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
