How to draw raster console fonts in GDI?

Question

How do I draw the raster fonts used by the Windows console in a GDI application? For instance, the 8x8 fixed font as shown in this screenshot.

Can these fonts be used via the CreateFont() API, or is there some special way that Windows loads these fonts?

Barmak Shemirani · Answer 1 · 2018-09-30T23:46:46.427

1

The console uses "fixed width fonts", such as "Courier New" (available in all Windows version) or "Consolas" (available since Vista).

Fixed width fonts are not necessarily raster. To use raster fonts, enumerate fonts to find a raster font such as "Terminal" or "Fixedsys". You have to use the right size (example, 18 for "Terminal" font) otherwise Windows may substitute a different font and resize. There are also issues with DPI settings. If program is not DPI aware then magnification will occur if work station has high DPI settings.

case WM_PAINT: 
{
    PAINTSTRUCT ps;
    auto hdc = BeginPaint(hwnd, &ps);
    auto hfont = CreateFont(-18, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
        ANSI_CHARSET,
        OUT_DEVICE_PRECIS,
        CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS,
        DEFAULT_QUALITY,
        DEFAULT_PITCH,
        L"Terminal");

    auto oldfont = SelectObject(hdc, hfont);

    RECT rc = { 0,0,100,300 };
    DrawText(hdc, L"Test 123", -1, &rc, DT_LEFT | DT_TOP);

    SelectObject(hdc, oldfont);
    DeleteObject(hfont);

    EndPaint(hwnd, &ps);
    return 0;
}

edited Sep 30 '18 at 23:46

answered Sep 30 '18 at 19:25

Barmak Shemirani

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Regarding DPI settings, I plan on drawing to an offscreen bitmap (with a memory HDC rather than BeginPaint/EndPaint). How do I pick a specific bitmap font regardless of monitor DPI settings? – William Oct 01 '18 at 16:18
So in my testing I am reliably picking a size regardless of DPI however I had to make the following changes: cWidth had to be specified, so to select the 8x8 font I had to have the first two parameters be `-8,-8`, and the other change I had to make to that example was to replace `ANSI_CHARSET` with `OEM_CHARSET` for the iCharSet parameter. – William Oct 05 '18 at 18:27
Please edit the question to show what you are doing, what the output looks like, and what you expect the output should look like. – Barmak Shemirani Oct 05 '18 at 19:57

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 06 '18 at 20:00

The answer was similar to Barmak's answer, with the difference that both width and height are specified, so to create a font for the 8x8 raster font I use the following code:

hfont = CreateFont(-8, -8, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, OEM_CHARSET, OUT_DEVICE_PRECIS,
        CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, DEFAULT_QUALITY, DEFAULT_PITCH, _T("Terminal"));

Specifically, both the height and width must be specified, and the OEM_CHARSET charset must be specified, in order to select one of the Raster Fonts.

My intent is to render to a DirectDraw surface (IDirectDrawSurface7::GetDC()) then subsequently paint that surface to the primary, as shown here:

With a bit of trickery involving multiple passes I added a bit of a shadow effect to the text, however that is outside the scope of my original question.

How to draw raster console fonts in GDI?

2 Answers2