How to get array of fonts contained in an NSFontCollection?

Question

How can you get an NSArray of fonts or fontfamilies that are "contained" by an NSFontCollection ?

All NSFont and NSFontManager methods seem to require a single NSFontDescriptor , while NSFontCollection returns an NSArray of NSFontDescriptor objects. It seems like there should be a method that returns fonts matching these.

Is it necessary to query each font descriptor against all fonts manually?

Answer 1

NSArray *familyNames = [[NSFontManager sharedFontManager] availableFontFamilies];

Answer 2

You can get the font collection's matchingDescriptors (an array of NSFontDescriptor ) and ask each descriptor for its -objectForKey:NSFontFamilyAttribute , and dump them (strings) into a set to unique them.

Alternatively you can turn each font descriptor into a font (by creating a font with the descriptor) and ask for its familyName (and then unique those).

Both of these methods are fairly straightforward with Swift's compactMap() (to discard nil s).