A font is a triple e.g. SansSerif / Bold Italic / 11 point — the combination of type Family, style and size encapsulated into a Font
object. See the file font.properties. Inside it are the definitions that map the virtual Java Unicode fonts onto the 8-bit native fonts. Sun may have
had to stitch together several 8-bit fonts to cover different regions of the Unicode character set in a Java virtual font. This allows the magic ability to simulate 16-bit
Unicode fonts that can display more than 256 different characters when you only have 8-bit native fonts available. In JDK 1.1 you can’t use a native font in Java unless
it has entries in the font.properties file to hook it up to some Java virtual font name. In subsequent JDK versions, you can also use any native font
installed on the target system. Fontlab Composer is a tool for stitching fonts together.
Java Font Support
| 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.
Java’s Font Class
Sun’s Javadoc on the
Font class : available:
Font font = new Font( "Tiresias PCFont Z", Font.BOLD+Font.Italic, 15 );
A Font does not have a colour attribute. It is always painted in the current foreground colour.
If you accidentally reverse the second and third constructor parameters, your code will compile, but the font display will be microscopic or invisible.
Font Design Is An Art
Circa 1980, I decided to add the French accented letters we use in Canada to the programmable font of an Okidata dot matrix printer. In isolation, my
accented letters looked beautiful, but when melded into the rest of the alphabet they looked like a ransom note. I have great respect for the artists who design the world’s
classic fonts. Each shape has to have an artistic consistency that says it belongs with the others. At the same time the glyphs must be easily distinguishable from each other.
The design has to look good even when rendered crudely on a CRT in small font sizes. Some people like to look at Flemish paintings. I love to look at beautiful fonts. When you
understand how much work goes into creating a great one, you would be less likely to pirate it. Peruse the “art gallery” at Adobe
or BitStream MyFonts.
What Fonts Are Available Windows
To see what fonts are available to Windows, click Start ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Appearance and
Personalization ⇒ Fonts .
These fonts will work in Windows word processors and many Windows programs
including browsers. Not all of the fonts will work in Java, or Java Applets however. To find
out the name of the corresponding file in C:\Windows, right click
Properties.
Installing a Font In Windows
To install a font in Windows Vista, usually TTF or OpenType-TTF:
- Click Start
- Control Panel
- Appearance and Personalisation
- Install or Remove a Font
- Click File. If you don’t see File, click Alt.
- Install New Font
- In the Add Fonts dialog box, under Drives, click the drive where the font that you want to install is located
- Under Folders, double-click the folder containing the fonts that you want to add
- Under List of fonts, click the font that you want to add
- click Install
What Fonts Are Available On My Machine under Java?
- In Windows, Java ignores your vector, bitmap and PostScript fonts. It can only use the TrueType and OpenType fonts. Further it will only use TrueType and OpenType fonts with
Unicode encodings. Older fonts or fonts with only a few specialty characters will often not work because they come only with 8-bit encodings. You might pester the font authors
to add the Unicode support. Modern fonts often come with several encodings. Java just uses the Unicode encoding.
- In AWT, you are limited to the five Java logical fonts, unless you use Canvas. drawString.
- Use the FontShower Amanuensis to show you what fonts are available, and what they look like in various styles, sizes and
colours, in both Swing and AWT.
- Browser Fonts available in HTML and CSS.
- Check in Control Panel ⇒ fonts to see what fonts your Operating System has installed and what the fonts are called. This list is not
necessarily identical to the list Java supports. In Vista Click
Start ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Appearance and Personalisation ⇒ Fonts to see what fonts are installed. The fonts themselves live in C:\windows\fonts.
- In JDK 1.4+ and perhaps earlier you also have: Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter.
- The Java logical fonts work best for rendering the more exotic characters. In addition these native fonts are fairly good: MS PGothic and MSUIgothic.
- Font name vs family vs fontname.
- If you are using Vista, this list will be available:
- Defining a Bold Italic Font:
Font f = new Font( "SansSerif", Font.BOLD + Font.ITALIC, 12 );
- As a programmer you can find out what fonts are available. JDK 1.2+ you can discover the supported fonts this way:
- In JDK 1.1, (Obsolete) use
String[] files = java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getFontList();
to discover the available fonts. They will include Serif (formerly known as TimesRoman), SansSerif
(formerly known as Helvetica) or Monospaced (formerly known as Courier). In JDK 1.2+, the native
fonts installed in the OS are also supported. The font names you feed to setFont must exactly match ones on that list. The ZapfDingbats
font is deprecated in 1.1.
Adding Fonts to JDK 1.3+
Font f = Font.createFont( Font.TRUETYPE_FONT, inputStream );
let’s you dynamically create a 1-point plain font from a TrueType font file. It does not have to be installed in the OS. You can then deriveFont
to create the fonts in the required sizes and styles. These fonts don’t work well at small point sizes because they don’t implement hinting. You could then fish
fonts from the net, from the local hard disk or from the jar, much the way you can fetch images.
This does not permanently install the font. There is no platform-independent way to do that. In Windows 2000, you can copy the TrueType font to C:\WINNT\FONTS.
You would have to read your font licence agreement carefully to see if it permits you to use the font in this way.
If you wish to use PostScript Type 1 multiple master fonts with W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista,
you need to install Adobe Type Manager 4.1 or later. Do not install ATM 4.0 or earlier on
W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista.
W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista have built-in support for ordinary PostScript Type 1 fonts,
and OpenType, though Java ignores the PostScript fonts.
Adding Fonts to JDK 1.2 (obsolete)
In JDK 1.2+ you can access fonts either by Java logical or native-physical name. To make a new font accessible to JDK 1.2 you have three choices:
- Install the font on your host by following the host’s directions for installing fonts. On Windows, for example, you do this via control panel ⇒
Fonts. The font will be available both to your native Windows apps and your Java apps. Most TrueType fonts have a Unicode cmap index. You’ll notice that only a
few do not. For example, if you look in your font.properties files, only Wingdings and Symbol fonts have the NEED_CONVERTED tag on them, which
indicates that they require a conversion from a Unicode codepoint to a different indexing scheme within the font. If they have a native cmap index, Java is able to use them
without special entries in the font.properties file.
- Copy the font into your jre/lib/fonts subdirectory. The font will be available only to Java. Notice that there are a set of Lucida fonts in there
already: Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter.
- Install the font using the font.properties file as you would in JDK 1.1. You would need to use this technique if you needed to stitch several 8-bit
fonts together to form one big Java logical Unicode font.
Units of Measure, Points and Pixels
Fonts are nominally measured in points, 1/72 of an inch tall. If Java truly did this, the number of pixels tall a given font was would depend both on the screen resolution and
the size of the user’s monitor. Fonts would grow and shrink all out of proportion to the surrounding graphical elements based on pixels. To get around this problem, Java
declares that one point equals one pixel. If you ask for a 10 point font, you are actually getting one nominally 10 pixels high. There will still be some characters taller and
some shorter than 10 pixels.
But the real problem is historical. Two fonts families, both 12 points can be drastically different sizes. The size includes a variable about of vertical white space the
designer thinks looks good with his font. You can see this effect clearly when you examine fonts with FontShower.
Different fonts all rendered at the same point size are drastically different in size. This creates a WORA nightmare for Java programmers. If a font
used to design an application is not not available on the client’s computer, or if the font has the same name, but a different provider, the text may be way too big or
too small to fit in the space allotted. You run into this problem even with the Sun standard logical default fonts like Dialog. Phhht! To deal with
this, I resorted to the ugly kludge of making my Applets 12% bigger than optimal on my Vista machine to give them some slop to run with larger versions of the 16 point Dialog
font on other platforms. Of course, this makes the Applets look silly on Vista machines.
Font Naming
Fonts have three names:
- The retail name used to sell the font, e.g. Century Schoolbook.
- The family name, usually abbreviated, e.g. CentSchbook BT. This is typically what you use in Java or in your CSS style
sheet. You must get the spelling exactly right including spaces.
- The precise font name, including adoments (suffixes to describe weight, style, stretch etc.), e.g. CentSchbook
BT Roman, CentSchbook BT Italic, CentSchbook BT Bold, CentSchbook BT Bold Italic, CentSchbook
BdCn BT Bold (bold condensed) or CentSchbook Mono BT (monospaced).
Acquiring Fonts
When buying fonts be aware that usually you buy the bold, italic, light, condensed etc. versions separately. They behave more or less as one font once you install them.
Sometimes you pay extra for the full character set. Check to see if your font has upper and lower case, accented letters, the €, ligatures, ornaments, small caps…
Check carefully exactly what is included in the bundle you buy.
Unfortunately, when you buy a font that usually gives you the right to use it on only your computer, but not to let people download it to view your webpages, or to include it
in your programs. Usually you would not even be permitted to include them in PDF documents. BitStream discontinued its scheme of downloadable fonts called webfonts
that let you include the font in your web pages. CSS provides a scheme to include your fonts in your web pages, but they have to be free fonts or fonts you have licenced to
distribute.
- Ask Google to help you find free fonts.
- Nicksfonts.com has a collection of freeware fonts.
myfonts.com
lets you test drive fonts before you buy by typing in sample text to see how it will look. This also lets you check if iI!|l o0O8¤[]() qg Ww `'‘’“”
()[]{} ;,. look too much alike. It also lets you check for kerning errors in the font design e.g. do WA nestle properly. Just seeing letters
in isolation does not give you a sense of what the font looks like in use. The generated font sample at MyFonts.com does not display in the box in the
upper right where you would expect. Look about half way down the page.
-
- I bought the Bitstream 500-font CD collection which contains the following fonts
Unfortunately it is no longer sold. However there is a 200-font Cambridge
collection for
. There is also a 1450-font Odyssey CD for
. It comes in Windows/Mac TTF/PostScript variants. It is licenced for 20 users or workstations. Here are some of the fonts it contains:
Unfortunately you can’t use these fonts on your website, other than by creating *.png files. You can’t give
them to your viewers to download to view your site.
- The fonts in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\PDFL\8.0\Fonts are PostScript-style otf fonts which Windows cannot handle.
Only Adobe Acrobat can use them. Confusingly, both ps-style and ttf-style OpenType fonts use the same otf extension.
Personal Picks
Here are some of my favourite fonts. If you don’t have the font installed you will see something only vaguely similar:
| Tiresias PCFont Z |
The letters are unusually distinctive so there is no confusing them. It is very clean simple proportional font. It was
designed for people with poor eyesight so gives particularly smooth reading for people with normal eyesight. Most fonts are poorly designed so it is hard to tell the
characters iI!|l o0O8¤[]() qg Ww `'‘’“” ()[]{} ;,. apart. Tiresias is a special font
family designed so that even the visually impaired can distinguish them. It looks like this:
If you already have it installed, all the type in this sentence will look similar. It is the default font for my website for non-Windows platforms. I asked the designers to
create a monospace variant but they declined. |
| Calibri |
Comes bundled with Vista. sans-serif. Renders very sharply. Very spare, like something an engineer might use on drawings. Lighter than
Arial. |
| Consolas |
Comes bundled with Vista. Renders very sharply. Monospaced. Perhaps the best looking monospaced font. Has a sort of Euro spare look. |
| Constantia |
Comes bundled with Vista. Renders very sharply. Somewhat old-fashioned looking with pronounced serifs. Used old-style figures.
0123456789 will be different sizes and alignments if you have it installed. |
| Segoe UI |
Comes bundled with Vista. Renders very sharply. Delicate, clean, works well in small sizes for labelling things. |
| DPCustomMono2 |
A monospaced font designed expressly for proofreading. It makes it easy to tell comma/period and colon/semicolon apart. You
need anti-aliasing turned on for it to look half-way decent. |
| Bookman Old Style |
This has an old-fashioned, relaxed, hot-oatmeal for breakfast look. |
| Palatino |
This an elegant font, something like the font equivalent of Paul Revere silver designs emphasising utility and simplicity. |
| Helvitica 32 Thin |
Close the font used for the logo of David Attenborough’s Planet
Earth, where they space it out. Very spare minimalist font. Made by Adobe. |
| Warnock Pro Opticals |
These are the Porsches of fonts. I doubt I will ever own them since they are so expensive. |
| Frutiger |
Microsoft ripped this elegant design off by changing it slightly and calling it Segoe and reserving it as
their corporate font. |
| OCR-B |
A monospaced font designed originally for optical character recognition. In making the characters distinct enough for computers,
they also made them distinct for rapid human reading. There are no decent free ones around. |
|
| Keystrokes |
Keycaps to let you explain the keystrokes you need to get do something on your PC. The problem is you are not allowed to use the
font on your website, which defeats the purpose of it. |
| Aquila Regular |
Just a touch of eccentricity to make it interesting. |
| Cash EF |
This a modern-looking monospace font. Further, even in the tiniest font sizes it is eminently readable. It’s big problem is
the zero and capital O are identical making this font useless for programmers. I have written the Eslner+Flake type
foundry who created it asking them to create a variant suitable for programmers. They ignored me. |
| Base Nine and Twelve |
This font is particularly good at small point sizes. It is an open design so the loops don’t clog. It offers
small caps. It is somewhat heavy looking. |
| Segoe Print |
looks like hand printing. Comes bundled with Vista. |
Font Licensing
I have been trying to make sense of the legalese on the font sites and talking with company representatives. I think the basic idea is, you can allow an many people as you
please to view your document using the font, but you can’t allow more than 1 to 20 people, depending on the agreement for the particular font, at your site to compose
new messages or documents using the font.
As I understand it, you typically can do the following things without needing an extra multi-user licence above and beyond buying the font:
- Use the font on your own computer
- Use the font on your own LAN for 1 to 20 computers at one site.
- Distribute a hard copy document using that font.
- Distribute a *.gif or Button containing some text in that font.
- Use the fonts in portable documents. You may send a TrueDoc *.pfr (Portable Font Resource)
with the understanding the *.pfr cannot be used for any other document.
- Embed fonts within PostScript *.ps and *.eps files, Acrobat *.pdf files, and *.evy
files for distribution, viewing, and imaging to other parties, with the understanding others may not extract the fonts to be used with any other document.
As I understand it, you need an extra multi-user license to do the following things:
- Distribute an electronic document using the font, e.g. Word *.doc, Acrobat *.pdf, *.html etc.
with the font packaged separately.
- Attach or embed the font in an email.
- Use the font on your website.
- Send a document using that font to a typesetter who does not own his own copy of the font. This is a an extra restriction on the general rule.
- Using a font in an Applet on your website.
- Embedding the font in a program you distribute.
Readable Fonts
In Windows, you can increase or decrease the size of fonts universally for all applications, dialog boxes, menus, icon titles etc. click Start ⇒
Settings ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Display ⇒ Settings ⇒ Advanced ⇒ General ⇒ Font Size. The catch is, if you increase fonts to 120%
bigger, some program such as ASO and PadCreator will garble their layouts. You can of course lower the screen resolution to
get bigger fonts, but that impairs your ability to look at images.
To control the font and size of any individual item such as tooltip, click Start ⇒ Settings ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Display ⇒ Appearance ⇒
Item . You can then select Active Title Bar, Inactive Title Bar, Palette Title, Message Box, Menu, Selected Item or Icon
and set the font and size.
Neither of these techniques will change the font sizes used by applications. For that you need to look to custom ways in each application to customise the fonts and sizes.
Java fonts look terrible because by default they do no antialiasing and ignore the hints. You can improve them with anti-aliasing.
Most fonts don’t support many of the national currency symbols. Tahoma is better than most.
Rendering
There are three ways to render fonts in Java.
- AWT: limited to the 5 Java logical fonts. Anti-aliasing is controlled by the OS. Easy to program.
Rendering is handled by the OS which renders the heavyweight peers associated with each Component. For an example of such rendering see FontShowerAWT.
- AWT Canvas: can use all the OS fonts. Can choose programmatically whether you want Anti-aliasing. This is difficult to program since you do all
your rendering at the low-level drawString level. For an example of such rendering see com.mindprod.fontshowerawt.
AntiAliastedFontedTextArea or FontedTextArea.
- Swing: can use all the OS fonts. Easy to program. Rendering the fonts is managed by the Swing runtime on lightweight JComponents. Anti-aliasing
is controlled by the OS. For an example of such rendering see FontShower for Swing.
On my Vista machine, configured in the Control Panel to use ClearType anti-aliasing to smooth font edges, under both AWT and Swing I see fonts fully anti-aliased. The only
time I see degraded fonts are when I view fonts rendered on an AWT Canvas without anti-alias. Ditto for XP. With an LCD monitor, you want ClearType
subpixel anti-aliasing. To turn it on click Start ⇒ Control Panel ⇒ Appearance and Personalization ⇒ Personalization ⇒ Windows color
and appearance ⇒ Open classic colour and appearance ⇒ Effects ⇒ ClearType.
Hinting
A separate matter from anti-aliasing is hinting. PostScript and OpenType fonts include hints on how to render small font sizes. You could think of it
in principle as raster versions of the fonts for tiny font sizes. In AWT, the OS renders the fonts using its native facilities for taking hints. In Swing, Java renders the
fonts, for all practical purposes ignoring the hints. The result is Swing fonts can look ratty at small point sizes, but quite decent at larger ones.
ClearType
Antialiasing creates the illusion of crisp smooth edges on rendered type ironically, by fuzzy the edge, by filling in a jaggy pixel with a colour intermediate between the
colours on either side of the boundary. This anti-aliasing can be done even to a sub-pixel level with the red, green and blue sub pixels on an LCD screen. Fonts that can do
this ultra-fine anti-aliasing are called ClearType. To turn on the rendering which makes text crisper by activating the extra rendering effort in Windows:
Here is how to activate ClearType font in Windows XP:
- Click Start
- Control Panel
- Appearance and Themes
- Display
- Appearance
- Effects
- Click Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts.
- Select ClearType in the list.
Here is how to activate ClearType font in Vista:
- Start
- Control Panel
- System and Maintenance
- Performance Information and Tools
- Adjust Visual Effects (on left)
- smooth edges of screen fonts
By default anti-aliasing is on. For some fonts, Vista even supports subpixel anti-aliasing called Clear Type.
You can fine tune the clear type by downloading
this powertuner from Microsoft.
Corrupt Fonts
Sometimes fonts will come out too tiny to see. Likely it means you have reversed the last two parameters when you created the font, a error the compiler cannot detect since Font
does not use enums, just enumerated int constants.
component.setFont( new Font( "Dialog", 12, Font.BOLD ));
component.setFont( new Font( "Dialog", Font.BOLD, 12 ));
On Windows, sometimes strange rendering problems are caused by a corrupt font cache. You can simply delete the cache, sacrifice a small reptile and reboot. Here’s how:
del C:\WINNT\System32\fntcache.dat
Other times the problem is a defective font. Before you pull your hair out, check to see if your problems go away if you try one of the standard fonts instead. Defective font
problems can manifest in bizarre ways — e.g. cursor offset from where it should be, duplicate rendering and misplaced text.
Bundling Fonts In a Jar
If you want to include custom fonts in your application, you either have to get the customer to install them or employ the following trick to use them directly from a jar.
This only works in Swing since AWT components are limited to the Java logical fonts.
Conserving Fonts
Font f = new Font( "Monospaced", Font.PLAIN, 12 )
is a very time consuming operation. Save your Font objects and reuse them rather than creating new ones. See FontSaver
to reduce RAM usage by Java fonts.
Having too many fonts installed, (not the same thing as having too many duplicate Font objects), has several drawbacks:
- They consume large amounts of RAM.
- They clutter your menus.
- They cause Windows to crash more frequently.
You can use a tool like Adobe Type Manager to rapidly and globally install/uninstall entire constellations of fonts.
Will this character Display?
boolean Font.canDisplay( char );
will let you know if there is a glyph matching a given Unicode character in a given font. Unfortunately, it has a rather lax definition of “can display”. It will
often return true and just display a blob or empty rectangle.
It is up to you to find a font that can display the character you need. Unfortunately, fonts often lie about what glyphs they can display. For example, if you ask them if they
can display a euro, they say yes, then display a blob, which in their distorted view of things counts as displaying the character. Technically, canDisplay
is supposed to return true for any code point in the range handled by the font, which is not very useful information.
Happily, if you specify a font not installed on the target machine, Java simply reverts to the default font. There is no mechanism similar to CSS or HTML where you can specify
a list of fonts in preference order. You have to code that yourself and feed setFont a specific Font.
Changing the Default Fonts
To change the default fonts inside the AWT use code like this:
Font defaultFont = new Font( "Dialog", Font.PLAIN, 12 );
UIManager.put( "Button.font", new FontUIResource ( defaultFont ) );
You can make similar default font changes to these elements:
| Button.font |
List.font |
PasswordField.font |
TableHeader.font |
ToggleButton.font |
| Checkbox.font |
Menu.font |
PopupMenu.font |
Text.font |
ToolBar.font |
| ColorChooser.font |
MenuBar.font |
ProgressBar.font |
TextArea.font |
ToolTip.font |
| ComboBox.font |
MenuItem.font |
RadioButton.font |
TextField.font |
Tree.font |
| EditorPane.font |
OptionPane.font |
ScrollPane.font |
TextPane.font |
|
| Label.font |
Panel.font |
Table.font |
TitledBorder.font |
|
For Swing there is a even more sweeping system of defaults called LAF Look and Feel.
see javax.swing.LookAndFeel and javax.swing.UIDefaults.
Sun’s Javadoc on the
LookAndFeel class : available:
Sun’s Javadoc on the
UIDefaults class : available:
The approach is to write your own Look & Feel that extends some other one, and just overrides a few font-defining methods or colour-defining methods. See this sample
code for a writing a derived LAF.
Here are some resources if you want to attempt multi-lingual fonts. Prior to JDK 1.4, I only managed
to get Unicode fonts to display properly with NT and Win2K and Internet Explorer. Windows 98 displays accented letters above 255 without the accents.
Font Gotchas
- The gotcha most likely to bite you in that, in AWT, you are limited to the Java logical fonts: Dialog, DialogInput,
Monospaced, Serif and SansSerif unless you take special measures, described later. Peered AWT
components, such as Label and TextField, can only use Java logical fonts. This means with AWT, you are pretty will stuck
with the basic set. You can get the others with drawString and a Canvas. If you try to use some other font, AWT will
just quietly substitute one of the Java logical fonts at the last second.
- If you use drawString in a paint method, you specify the baseline left corner of where you want the text to go, not the
top left as for most other painting. In most other Font uses, the component deals with such details for you automatically.
- If you include an exotic character like '\u060b', the Afghani currency sign, drawString, or Component
that uses it, will render your string from right to left, displaying the characters in reverse order.
- Peered AWT components, such as Label and TextField cannot display the full font complement. For example, using the Dialog
Java Java logical font, peered components can display 6 of 27 international currency symbols. Using Canvas, you can display 18 of 27. The reason is
Swing Components and Canvas/drawString have access to Graphics2D where AWT peer Components
are limited by whatever the host GUI OS provides via the peer rendering.
- new Label.getFont() will just give you null. A Component does
not acquire a default Font until it has a parent.
- \u0e3f in a JTextArea inhibits antialiasing, ditto \ufdfc. \u0e3f
is a Thai Baht currency sign like a capital B with a line through it. \ufdfc is the Yemeni Rial currency sign. It looks like Arabic script.
Using one of these characters turns off anti-aliasing for the entire JTextArea. They seem to have no such effect in AWT with drawString
or with TextArea. This strange behaviour has been observed both in Win2K and Linux. See antialiasing for details.
- Microscopic fonts, too tiny to see, have two common causes.
Books
 |
recommend book⇒Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs) |
| | paperback |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-1-56898-448-3 |
|---|
| ISBN10: | 1-56898-448-0 |
|---|
| publisher: | Princeton Architectural Press |
|---|
| published: | 2004-09-09 |
|---|
| by: | Ellen Lupton |
|---|
| This is not a font catalog book. It is a book about how to select the right font for the job, and about how to design type generally. |
|
 |
recommend book⇒Big Book of 5000 Fonts: (And Where to Get Them) |
| | hardcover |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-0-8230-0489-8 |
|---|
| ISBN10: | 0-8230-0489-9 |
|---|
| publisher: | Watson-Guptill Publications |
|---|
| published: | 2002-02 |
|---|
| by: | David Carter |
|---|
| also includes websites with free downloadable fonts. Note the publish date. Font books in general tend to be out of date. |
|
 |
recommend book⇒Logo Font & Lettering Bible: A Comprehensive Guide to the Design, Construction and Usage of Alphabets and Symbols |
| | hardcover |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-1-58180-436-2 |
|---|
| ISBN10: | 1-58180-436-9 |
|---|
| publisher: | How Design Books |
|---|
| published: | 2004-03 |
|---|
| by: | Leslie Cabarga |
|---|
| This is about how to design your owncustom fonts and logos. |
|
Learning More
Sun’s Javadoc on the
Font class : available:
Sun’s Javadoc on the
FontMetrics class : available:
Sun’s JDK Technote Guide on
Font Configuration Files : available:
2008-02-24 by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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