In this post I outline how I got a custom font to work in Silverlight after having some issues with compatibility.

While the winter here in the UK seems to have no end in sight this year I have been trying some new things out with Silverlight 3. I got quite bored of using the standard fonts and decided to start looking around for some slick fonts to use in my projects. Using the awesome Identifont I came across AUdimat by Jack Usine.

To get your font into your Silverlight project all you have to do is add the file and make sure the project has marked it as a resource. Then, to apply the font in your page just set the FontFamily attribute like so: FontFamily="filename#fontname". In my case this was: FontFamily="AUdimat-Regular.otf#AUdimat". Too easy? You bet ya.

Ran my project and got a load of garbage output from my test TextBlock “This is some text”. Doing some digging I started to discover the world of fonts and Silverlight is not one of rainbows and fluffy bunnies. This article from Silverlight Spy is the most comprehensive at outlining font support with Silverlight and provides a brief history of fonts.

The outline format of the AUdimat font was causing the problem so I had two options; find another font, convert it to a compatible format. Given the fact I had spent a while searching for the exact font I wanted I went with the second option. To accomplish this I was lucky to find the FREE Online Font Converter. Now I had my font in TrueType format I added it back to my project, changed my FontFamily attributes to FontFamily="AUdimat-Regular.ttf#AUdimat" et voila. A beautiful rare font in my Silverlight app. A big thank you to those sites I made use of.