How can I bundle a font with my .net winforms application?

I'd like to use a non-standard font for my .net 3.0 Winforms application.

This font might be installed on some of my user's computer, but it will clearly be missing on some ot开发者_如何学Gohers.

How can I ship the font with my program ? Do I need to install the font ? If so, is the lack of administrator privileges going to be an issue?

You'll have to use an installer to get the font registered on the target machine. But maybe you won't have to, GDI+ supports private fonts.

Here's a blog article I wrote that shows a way to embed fonts as resources in your application (no dll imports necessary :).

Embedding Fonts in your .Net Application

Here's the class I create where all the magic happens. The blog article includes instructions and an example of using it.

using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Text;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
namespace EmbeddedFontsExample.Fonts
{
    public class ResFonts
    {
        private static PrivateFontCollection sFonts;
        static ResFonts()
        {
            sFonts = new PrivateFontCollection();
            // The order the fonts are added to the collection 
            // should be the same as the order they are added
            // to the ResFontFamily enum.
            AddFont(MyFonts.Consolas);
        }
        private static void AddFont(byte[] font)
        {
            var buffer = Marshal.AllocCoTaskMem(font.Length);
            Marshal.Copy(font, 0, buffer, font.Length);
            sFonts.AddMemoryFont(buffer, font.Length);
        }
        public static Font Create(
            ResFontFamily family, 
            float emSize, 
            FontStyle style = FontStyle.Regular, 
            GraphicsUnit unit = GraphicsUnit.Pixel)
        {
            var fam = sFonts.Families[(int)family];
            return new Font(fam, emSize, style, unit);
        }
    }
    public enum ResFontFamily
    {
        /// <summary>Consolas</summary>
        Consolas = 0
    }
}

This page explains in detail how to embed a font into a winforms project.