How to Change the Font of Telerik RadControls

Environment

Product Version	Product	Author
2021.1.223	Telerik UI for WinForms	Desislava Yordanova

Description

A common requirement is to change the font for all Telerik RadControls in your project with a single global setting, e.g. setting the form's Font property. Is this even possible?

Solution

The short answer to this question is that there is no global setting which would change the font of all controls in your application. This should be done on per control/element basis in code or by modifying the desired theme.

The standard Microsoft controls are inheriting the font from the Form. With the Telerik UI for WinForms suite, the font is set in the theme explicitly for each control. The Telerik UI for WinForms controls suite is architecturally designed to have similar to the WPF structure, which allows easy access and modifications to each element in the element hierarchy (Telerik Presentation Framework) and thus allows theming support - 30 professionally designed themes are available out of the box. The font of a particular control is usually defined in the theme and that's why it is not inherited by its parent.

The correct way to change the font of your controls is to set it individually to each control. Please note that for some controls (like RadLabel), it is enough to set the Font property, while for others (like RadGridView), you will need to introduce this setting in a formatting event, e.g. the CellFormatting event that RadGridView offers.

Another way to change the font is to modify the desired theme: How to Customize a Theme.