Answer by @Abrax5 is excellent. I just wanted to add my experience with this problem and could not fit it into a comment:
As far as I can tell, this error is raised only on the first failed attempt to initialise an NSFont with a font name that is not available. NSFont initialisers are failable and will return nil in such a case at which time you have an opportunity to do something about it.
You can check whether a font by a given name is available using:
NSFontDescriptor(fontAttributes: [NSFontNameAttribute: "<font name>"]).matchingFontDescriptorWithMandatoryKeys([NSFontNameAttribute]) != nil
Unfortunately, this also raises the error! The following method does not, but is deprecated:
let fontDescr = NSFontDescriptor(fontAttributes: [NSFontNameAttribute: "<font name>"])
let isAvailable = NSFontManager.sharedFontManager().availableFontNamesMatchingFontDescriptor(fontDescr)?.count ?? 0 > 0
So the only way I found of checking the availability of a font of a given name without raising that error is as follows:
public extension NSFont {
private static let availableFonts = (NSFontManager.sharedFontManager().availableFonts as? [String]).map { Set($0) }
public class func available(fontName: String) -> Bool {
return NSFont.availableFonts?.contains(fontName) ?? false
}
}
For example:
NSFont.available("Georgia") //--> true
NSFont.available("WTF?") //--> false
(I'm probably overly cautious with that optional constant there and if you are so inclined you can convert the returned [AnyObject] using as! [String]...)
Note that for the sake of efficiency this will not update until the app is started again, i.e. any fonts installed during the app's run will not be matched. If this is an important issue for your particular app, just turn the constant into a computed property:
public extension NSFont {
private static var allAvailable: Set<String>? {
return (NSFontManager.sharedFontManager().availableFonts as? [String]).map { Set($0) }
}
private static let allAvailableAtStart = allAvailable
public class func available(fontName: String) -> Bool {
return NSFont.allAvailable?.contains(fontName) ?? false
}
public class func availableAtStart(fontName: String) -> Bool {
return NSFont.allAvailableAtStart?.contains(fontName) ?? false
}
}
On my machine available(:) takes 0.006s. Of course, availableAtStart(:) takes virtually no time on all but the first call...
