Xamarin.Forms: Custom Fonts

To kick off this whole website thing I’m going to start with a small post on how to use a custom font with Xamarin.Forms. I’m going to cover both the “old” way of adding custom fonts and the new and improved method that was added in Xamarin.Forms 4.5.530.

First off, download the custom font that you want to use, I’m going to use Roboto Mono from Google Fonts but feel free to use any font that you desire.

Before Xamarin.Forms 4.5.530

1. Add the font to your platform projects

Once downloaded, you need to add the font to the platform projects. Each platform has its own way of importing custom fonts but they are very straightforward to do:

iOS

For iOS add the font file to the Resources folder under the iOS project, making sure that the build action for the file is set to BundleResource. After adding the font you’ll need to update the Info.plist so that the app can use the custom font:

Android

For Android add the font file to the Assets folder under the Android project, making sure that the build action for the file is set to AndroidAsset.

2. Create a reusable resourse

To make life easier and remove duplication every time you want to use the custom font in a particular control we’re going to set up an OnPlatform resource within the application’s resource dictionary.

• x:Key is the name of the resource entry, this will be used whenever you want to reference this resource on a control.
• For iOS Value is the name of the font
• For Android Value is the filename of the font plus the name of the font

3. Use the font

Once you have defined the OnPlatform resource above you can simply use it to set the FontFamily of a control:

Xamarin.Forms 4.5.530 or newer

1. Add the font to your Xamarin.Forms ‘shared’ project

Since Xamarin.Forms 4.5.530 there is no longer a need to add custom fonts to all platform projects, instead it should be added to your main Xamarin.Forms .netstandard ‘shared’ project and have a Build Action of EmbeddedResource. The font file can be placed in any folder within the project and will be picked up automatically as long as it has the correct build action.

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Note that when using an embedded font it is not necessary to to edit the iOS info.plist!

2. Register the font

Before you can use your custom font on an actual control it needs to be “exported” using the ExportFont assembly attribute. As the attribute is an assembly level attribute it’s common to put it in a file such as AssemblyInfo.cs, however, I tend to put it at the top of my App.xaml.cs file so that it is more visible when looking at the code.

Although optional I’d always recommend setting an alias so there is no confusion as to the value that should be used when setting a FontFamily.

3. Use the font

Once exported you can simply use the Alias that you set as the FontFamily on the desired control.

Screenshots

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Repo

Links

• Fonts in Xamarin.Forms