FontShower for Swing  FontShower for Swing

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This Applet will help you write Java code. It will show you what Swing fonts are available via Java on your machine, and what they look like in a variety of styles, sizes and colours. There is another version of this program called FontShower for AWT. It display colours both as decimal and hex numbers, so it is more useful if you are primarily choosing colours rather than fonts. Use the Unicode Applet if you want to view the entire Unicode character set.

If you select the all fonts option, it will display the true heights of a 10 point font. Excusing themselves with artistic licence, font desingers make their type sometimes up to twice as tall as requested or as small as half as tall. It makes some sense for fonts that also render Chinese to increase the size to ensure any Chinese rendered will still be legible. You might use these numbers to adjust the font sizes selected in css or Java to fully or partially compensate. Sorry, you need Java 1.5+ to run this Applet. If the font of interest supported all the characters, the display would look like this:
all characters

If, fontshower, the above Font Shower for Swing Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) does not work…

  1. This Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) needs Java 1.5 or later, best version 1.5.0_22 or later, version 1.6.0_17 recommended and a recent browser.
  2. You should see the Applet hybrid above looking much like the screenshot. If you don’t, the following should help you get it working:
  3. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, try another browser. Seriously. Microsoft has taken great pains, over and over, to screw up Java and every other multi-platform standardisation.
  4. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or 8, you must allow blocked content permission for Active X to run. This also gives permission to Java to run. Click the Information bar, and then click Allow blocked content. Unfortunately, this also allows dangerous ActiveX code to run. However, you must do this in order to get access to perfectly-safe Java Applets running in a sandbox. This is part of Microsoft’s war on Java. Don’t put up with it! Use a different browser.
  5. Especially if this Applet hybrid has worked before, try clearing the browser cache and rebooting.
  6. To ensure your Java is up to date, check with Wassup. First, download it and run it as an application independent of your browser, then run it online as an Applet to add the complication of your browser.
  7. If the above Applet hybrid does not work, check the Java console for error messages.
  8. If the above Applet hybrid does not work, you might have better luck with the downloadable version.
  9. If you are using Mac OS X and would like an improved Look and Feel, download the QuaQua look & feel from randelshofer.ch/quaqua. UnZip the contained quaqua.jar and install it in ~/Library/Java/Extensions or one of the other ext dirs.
  10. If you still can’t get the program working click HELP for more detail.
  11. If you can’t get the above Applet hybrid working after trying the advice above and from the HELP button below, have bugs to report or ideas to improve the program or its documentation, please send me an email atemail Roedy Green.
Java powered   Get New Java  Get New Browser   Help
FontShower is displaying the Swing fonts available on your machine via Java. Other people will have different fonts installed and will see different selections available via Java on their machines. If your machine is configured to show the crisp anti-aliased fonts by default, you will will no difference between the anti-aliased and plain version. This is a Good Thing ™. You can get Windows to anti-alias by default with Start ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Display ⇒ Effects ⇒ Smooth edges of screenfonts

Your browser will see a slightly different set of fonts than this Java Applet does. Java has a few extra private fonts, and some browser fonts don’t work with Java.

Some of the fonts may just show empty squares. These are older 8-bit fonts that don’t support 16-bit Unicode used by Java. Don’t necessarily delete them ( by clicking Control Panel ⇒ fonts ⇒ delete) since word processing documents, or the DOS box, may still be using them. on the other hand, pruning out ugly fonts you never use will speed up your machine.

You may not notice any difference with font-smoothing anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing does not work on some machines. Look for the anti-alias smoothing especially in very large font sizes in capital W in the fonts with thin spidery diagonals, e.g. Bodoni, Book Antiqua, Garamond, Serif and Zapf Calligraphic.

Hint: If you put the cursor on the font family dialog box, you can scroll up and down using up or down arrow key to display all possible font samples very rapidly.

To compare two fonts side by side, download the FontShower jar and run two copies of it standalone.

Fonts that show unusually large numbers of glyphs
Font Number of Glyphs
Arial Unicode MS 50377
Bitstream Cyberbit 29934
LastResort 6207
Everson Mono Unicode 4899

FontShower will only show Fonts supported under Java.

Font Support Under Java
Font Type Extension Java 1.6 Windows Java 1.6 Linux Java 1.6 Fedora Old Java Windows Notes
OpenType
(TrueType internally)		 otf High-end fonts for Windows.
OpenType
(PostScript Adobe CCF internally)		 otf High end PostScript fonts. You can detect these by the file signature { 0x4F, 0x54, 0x54, 0x4F } — the string "OTTO", at the head of the file.
TrueType ttf Most common font for Windows.
PostScript pfm/pfb Older style PS fonts. Supported by PostScript printer hardware. Windows itself supports PS fonts, at least with Adobe Type Manager, but Java ignores them.
Bitmap fon Used primarily for small font sizes. Come only a small set of point sizes.
Vector outline fon These are obsolete. Used by Windows without Java.
8-bit fonts any Java needs 16-bit fonts. It won’t use 8-bit fonts directly. Old or specialty 8-bit fonts can be used by stitching them together with a Unicode mapping, a daunting task.
SVG fonts svg Vector fonts used in Linux. They tend to be free. Java does not out-the-box support them. Opera 10 beta supports them, and allows them to be downloaded with a web page so you can use fonts the viewer does not necessarily already have installed.
AWT will only support the five basic logical fonts, unless you paint on a Canvas, however oddly under Fedora and AWT you can use up to 82 of your installed fonts. If you try to use more, you get an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. The above information may be incorrect or may become incorrect at any time. Feel free to try any fonts with Java on any platform. The worst that could happen is they won’t work.

PackageVersionReleasedLicenceLanguageNotes 
fontshower
FontShower		 2.9 2009-09-30 free Java
summary ❘ facts ❘ screenshot ❘ browse source repository for the current version of FontShower. Displays Swing fonts available to Java on your machine in various styles, sizes and colours. Displays true font heights.
download FontShower Java source and compiled class files to run on your own machine as an application or Applet.

First install the most recent Java.

To install, extract the zip download with WinZip, (or similar unzip utility) into any directory you please, often J:\ — ticking off the “user folder names” option.

To check out the corresponding source from the Subversion repository, use the TortoiseSVN repo-browser to
access fontshower source in repository with [Tortoise] Subversion client on wush.net/svn/mindprod/com/mindprod/fontshower/.

After you have installed the jar, you can run it as an application. Type:

java -jar J:\com\mindprod\fontshower\fontshower.jar

adjusting as necessary to account for where the jar file is.

download ASP PAD XML program description for the current version of FontShower.

FontShower is free. Full source included. You may even include the source code, modified or unmodified in commercial programs that you write and distribute. Non-military use only.
    
 
anti-aliasing
browser fonts shows what fonts your browser supports
ClearType
colour
Fonts
FontShower for AWT
FontShower Student Project
other downloads
point
Reuters Unicode Displayer
Unicode
CMP homejump to top You can get the freshest copy of this page from: or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
http://mindprod.com/applet/fontshower.html J:\mindprod\applet\fontshower.html
CMP logofeedback Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to Roedy Green : feedback email
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