Eto Fonts - best practices

Rhino Developer
,
1

Hello everyone,

I’m dealing with fonts on macOS, and I’m trying to load a list of system fonts to choose from.

Initially I was using the “off-the-shelf” Eto.forms.FontDialog.
This dialog is presented as a semi-modal window, while I wanted a modal dialog that explicitly asks the user to choose a font and then gets out of the way.
So I implemented a custom Font Dialog that uses the Eto.Drawing.Fonts.AvailableFontFamilies property which I expect - as stated in the documentation - to return

an enumeration of available font families in the current system

So this is what I get:

Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 15.40.02
Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 15.40.021540×1804 279 KB

But the list of fonts retrieved are different from the one in the Eto.forms.FontDialog:

Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 15.43.42
Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 15.43.421191×642 188 KB

Moreover, I was expecting the list of fonts to reflect the files I can find on the Mac at location /System/Library/Fonts or /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental, (or at least the ones with *.ttf extension) but actually there are some fonts in those folders that are not picked up by either solutions.

I just wanted to know if the “available fonts” are retrieved from those locations and which logic is used to filter them.
Has any of you ever had experiences with loading and using fonts in Eto Apps?
Is there a “best practice” to follow?

Thanks for any suggestion

2

Hi @p.stragliotto,

Rhino’s Text dialog does something like this:

List<FontQuartet> fontQuartets = Rhino.DocObjects.Font.InstalledFontsAsQuartets().ToList();
foreach (FontQuartet fq in fontQuartets)
    Rhino.RhinoApp.WriteLine(fq.QuartetName);

– Dale