Font Specification

ChartDirector relies on the operating system font files in the "[windows]\Fonts" directory. You may use the File Explorer to see what fonts are available and their file names.

In additional to the OS fonts, ChartDirector also supports a private fonts subdirectory, which is the "fonts" subdirectory under the directory that contains the ChartDirector library (chartdir??.dll, libchartdir.so or libchartdir.dylib, depending on the OS). This allows using fonts that are not installed in the OS.

If you want ChartDirector to search other directories for the font files, you may list the directories in an environment variable called "FONTPATH".

If you specify an absolute path name for the font file, ChartDirector will use the absolute path name and will not search other directories.

Whereas most popular font comes with different styles for regular, bold, italic and bold italic, some fonts only come with one style. For example, the Monotype Corsiva font that comes with MS Office only has the regular style (mtcorsva.ttf). For these cases, you may append "Bold" and/or "Italic" after the font file name (separated with a space). ChartDirector will then artificially bolden and/or italicize the font. For example, you may specify the font name as "mtcorsva.ttf Bold".

Instead of specifying a single font file as the font name, you may specify a list of font files as the font name, separated by semi-colons. This is useful when using international characters that are only available in some fonts.

For example, if you would like to use the Arial font ("arial.ttf") for western characters, and the MingLiu font "mingliu.ttc" for Chinese characters (since the Arial font does not have Chinese characters), you may specify the font name as "arial.ttf;mingliu.ttc". In this case, ChartDirector will try the Arial font first. If it cannot find a certain character there, it will try the MingLiu font.

ChartDirector supports several special keywords for specifying the font name indirectly. When these keywords are used as font names, ChartDirector will look up the actual font names from a font table. The keywords are as follows:

Keywords	Description
"normal"	This default normal font, which is the first font in the font table. This is initially mapped to "arial.ttf" (Arial).
"bold"	The default bold font, which is the second font in the font table. This is initially mapped to "arialbd.ttf" (Arial Bold).
"italic"	The default italic font, which is the third font in the font table. This is initially mapped to "ariali.ttf" (Arial Italic).
"boldItalic"	The default bold-italic font, which is the fourth font in the font table. This is initially mapped to "arialbi.ttf" (Arial Bold Italic).
"fontN"	The (N + 1)th font in the font table (the first font is "font0").

The font table can be modified using BaseChart.setFontTable or DrawArea.setFontTable.

The advantage of using indirect font names is that you can change the fonts fonts in your charts in one place.

Most font files contain one font. However, it is possible a font file contains multiple fonts (that is, a font collection). For example, in True Type fonts, font files with extension ".ttc" may represent a font collection.

If a font file contains multiple font, the font index can be used to specify which font to use. By default, the font index is 0, which means the first font in the font file will be used.

The font size decides how big a font will appear in the image. The font size is expressed in a font unit called points. This is the same unit used in common word processors.

Instead of specifying font size, some ChartDirector API (eg. TextBox.setFontSize) allow you to specify font height and font width separately. You may use different point sizes for font height and font width to create special effects.

This is the color to draw the font. (See Color Specification on how colors are represented in ChartDirector.)

This is the angle in degrees by which the font should be rotated anti-clockwise.

By default, text are laid out horizontally, with characters being drawn from left to right.

ChartDirector also supports vertical layout, with characters being drawn from top to bottom. For example, you may use BaseChart.addText to add text that are laid out vertically. Vertical layout is common for oriental languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.