Is there a “reasonably safe” (i.e., “somewhat general”, non-installation-specific) way to ask for a monospace font when using the NSFont class?

I just want to set a monospaced font for some results I am displaying in a text view.

How much will I be hosed for asking for something like “Courier” by name? On most people’s systems?

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Try [NSFont userFixedPitchFontOfSize:0.0] to get the user’s default monospace font and size.

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Aha. Just a hole in my knowledge of font terminology. Didn’t realize it was horizontal as well as vertical. Thank you. I guess there is no guarantee of any particular font always being present on a system. I see people complain all the time that their Terminal doesn’t work and it turns out that it is because they are missing the Monaco font.

well, that’s their problem then. Moncaco lives in /System. i.e. it’s untouchable. there’s no guarantee of anything at all being present on their system if they’re going to do something like that.

I’ve also had to do support over the phone and it turns out the person (a designer) recently cleaned up on his system by deleting all the fonts he didn’t need! ;)

i once had a designer ask me if it was ok to delete everything in /bin, /usr and so on, since he “never used anything in there and didn’t believe in the command line”

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You must realize that starting with panther, it is possible to disable fonts via FontBook. See: http://diveintoosx.org/panther/font_management.html

JoeCrow