[cairo] How to check if a font exists in Cairo and Pango?

[Ken Resander]

My application should check if a font exists and if it does not try the next font preference obtained from the user, a bit like processing a font-choice list in CSS.

Cairo:
const char * str = "nosuchfont";
cairo_font_face_t * ff =
 cairo_toy_font_face_create ( str ,
                              CAIRO_FONT_SLANT_NORMAL ,
                              CAIRO_FONT_WEIGHT_NORMAL ) ;
const char * toyfamilyis = cairo_toy_font_face_get_family ( ff );

The toyfamilyis was returned as 'nosuchfont'. The manual mentions that toy_font_face_create and the cairo_font_select_face do not report back whether the font exists or not. A pity. If it returned NULL for a non-existent choice then my program could loop through the user preferences.

I also tried pango:
PangoFontDescription * pfd = pango_font_description_from_string ( str );
const char * familyis = pango_font_description_get_family(pfd);

This time familyis was also returned as 'nosuchfont'.

I have read somewhere that pango can tell if a font exists.

How can I make it return this information?

Ken
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