System Fonts

SystemFonts are convenient because they let you get moving without shipping font files yourself. They also come with the tradeoff that the available families depend on the machine you are running on, so this page treats portability as part of the topic rather than an afterthought.

Use it when you want to work with platform fonts directly instead of loading files into your own FontCollection.

What SystemFonts exposes

The main entry points are:

• SystemFonts.Families to enumerate installed families
• SystemFonts.Get(...) and SystemFonts.TryGet(...) to resolve a family by invariant name
• SystemFonts.CreateFont(...) to create a Font directly
• SystemFonts.Collection when you also need access to the searched directories

using SixLabors.Fonts;

Font caption = SystemFonts.CreateFont("Segoe UI", 12);
Font heading = SystemFonts.CreateFont("Segoe UI", 24, FontStyle.Bold);

Replace "Segoe UI" with any installed family that exists on your machine.

Enumerate available families

Use SystemFonts.Families when you want to inspect what the current environment actually exposes.

using System;
using SixLabors.Fonts;

foreach (FontFamily family in SystemFonts.Families)
{
    Console.WriteLine(family.Name);
}

Use culture-aware lookup

Font family names can vary by culture, so SystemFonts also exposes the same culture-aware lookup helpers as FontCollection.

using System.Globalization;
using SixLabors.Fonts;

CultureInfo japanese = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("ja-JP");

if (SystemFonts.TryGetByCulture("Yu Gothic", japanese, out FontFamily family))
{
    Font font = family.CreateFont(16);
}

You can also create a font directly with the culture-aware CreateFont(...) overloads.

Merge system fonts into your own collection

If you want your own custom fonts and the machine fonts in one lookup surface, copy the system font set into a FontCollection.

using SixLabors.Fonts;

FontCollection collection = new();
collection.AddSystemFonts();
collection.Add("fonts/BrandSans-Regular.ttf");

There is also a filtered overload when you only want a subset of the installed fonts.

using System;
using SixLabors.Fonts;

FontCollection collection = new();
collection.AddSystemFonts(metric =>
    metric.Description.FontFamilyInvariantCulture.Contains("Noto", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));

Search directories

SystemFonts.Collection implements IReadOnlySystemFontCollection, which exposes SearchDirectories.

That is useful for diagnostics and for understanding where the current process looked for fonts.

using System;
using SixLabors.Fonts;

foreach (string directory in SystemFonts.Collection.SearchDirectories)
{
    Console.WriteLine(directory);
}

Portability considerations

The available system fonts are environment-specific.

• Windows, Linux, macOS, containers, and CI agents will often expose different families.
• A family name that exists on your dev machine may not exist in production.
• If predictable output matters, prefer shipping the fonts you need and loading them into a FontCollection.

For file-based loading, see Loading Fonts and Collections. For metadata-only inspection, see Font Metadata and Inspection.

Practical guidance

• Use SystemFonts for host-specific behavior and diagnostics.
• Use a private FontCollection for deterministic rendering.
• Log SearchDirectories when diagnosing missing fonts in containers or CI.
• Resolve by culture-aware names only when the user-facing font name is localized.