Get Font Info

[ajpizarro]

I would like to get some info from the font files. I would like to get : copyright info, version, authors, if it can be embedded or not, license info, etc. Is it possible to get this data? Thanks in advance.

[HinTak]

You don't need SharpFont for most of that. Except for the embedded permission, one of freetype's demo program, ftdump, does all of that if you run ftdump -n .... Don't know where the embedded bit is stored off the top of my head, but it is easy enough to look it up if you need to know.

Of course you can rewrite ftdump in C# if you insist. The freetype-py people wrote a python-based version.

[HinTak]

Also font validator's report (https://github.com/Microsoft/Font-Validator) includes most of that info too. My substantial fork of it uses SharpFont to interact with freetype, but the font parser itself is pure C# and independent of freetype. It might be more suitable to your needs if you want a pure C# answer, instead of SharpFont, which is really pivoting into a platform c-based library.

[Robmaister]

ftdump appears to be pulling the copyright, authors, etc from FT_Get_Sfnt_Name, which is certainly available from within SharpFont (Face.GetSfntName).

Following ftdump as a guide is probably a good idea here. Relevant bit (Print_Sfnt_Names) is on line 257 of ftdump.c of the latest ft2demos release (2.8).

@HinTak it sounds like @Antoniotony is more asking where within FreeType/SharpFont that functionality is available so that the same data can be retrieved from within C# without needing anything else installed (can't run ftdump on iOS, for example).

[HinTak]

I think pinvoke on IOS is tricky also. In any case, Microsoft's font validator has all the functionamity for reading sfnt tables implemented in C#, without pinvoke. (the proprietary 1.0 /1.1 uses mixed mode assemblies for the part that I use SharpFont/freetype in 2.0). Most of the requested info are in the analysis report output.

If you can pinvoke, the easiest thing is perhaps stuffing the whole of ftdump + freetype into a dll, and just pinvoke ftdump's main()!

[HinTak]

I looked up the embedded permission flag. It is in the OS/2 table. The output report from font validator gives verbose answer on that. e.g. "Preview and Print embedding/Editable embedding/No subsetting/Bitmap embedding only" etc. in the OS/2 table analysis section. Most of the other info are at the top.

[ajpizarro]

I'm sorry I did not answer before but i couldn't.
I'll give it a try and i would let you know.
Thank you very much.