• size — The size of the text, either in points (the default) or logical drawing units, depending on the “size-in-pixels?” property (see below).

• family — A platform- and device-independent font designation. The families are:

  • 'default

  • 'decorative

  • 'roman

  • 'script

  • 'swiss

  • 'modern (fixed width)

  • 'symbol (Greek letters and more)

  • 'system (similar to the font to draw control labels, but see normal-control-font)

  The terminology “family” and “face” is mangled relative to its usual meaning. A font% “face” is really used more like a font family in the usual terminology or more generally as a face-description string that is combined with other font% attributes to arrive at a face. A font% “family” is a kind of abstract font family that is mapped to a particular font family on a given platform.

• face — A string face name, such as "Courier". The format and meaning of a face name is platform- and device-specific. If a font’s face name is #f, then the font’s appearance depends only on the family. If a face is provided but no mapping is available for the face name (for a specific platform or device), then the face name is ignored and the family is used. See font-name-directory<%> for information about how face names are mapped for drawing text.

• style — The slant style of the font, one of:

  • 'normal

  • 'slant (a.k.a “oblique”)

  • 'italic

• weight — The weight of the font, one of:

  • 'normal

  • 'light

  • 'bold

• underline? — #t for underlined, #f for plain.

• smoothing — Amount of anti-alias smoothing, one of:

  • 'default (platform-specific, sometimes user-configurable)

  • 'partly-smoothed (gray anti-aliasing)

  • 'smoothed (sub-pixel anti-aliasing)

  • 'unsmoothed

• size-in-pixels? — #t if the size of the font is in logical drawing units (i.e., pixels for an unscaled screen or bitmap drawing context), #f if the size of the font is in points (which can depend on screen resolution).

• hinting — Whether font metrics should be rounded to integers:

  • 'aligned (the default) — rounds to integers to improve the consistency of letter spacing for pixel-based targets, but at the expense of making metrics unscalable

  • 'unaligned — disables rounding

To avoid creating multiple fonts with the same characteristics, use the global font-list% object the-font-list.

See also font-name-directory<%>.

See font% for information about family, style, weight, smoothing, size-in-pixels?, and hinting. font-name-directory<%>.

See also make-font.

Due to space included in a font by a font designer, a font tends to generate text that is slightly taller than the nominal size.

For a size in points and a screen or bitmap drawing context, the logical height depends on the resolution of the screen.

If the second argument is true, the result indicates whether the glyph is available for control labels. Otherwise, it indicates whether the glyph is available for dc<%> drawing.

For dc<%> drawing, due to automatic font substitution when drawing or measuring text, the result of this method does not depend on this font’s attributes (size, face, etc.). The font’s attributes merely provide a hint for the glyph search.