Java Glossary : Font

Java definitions: 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You are here : home : Java Glossary : F words : Font.

Font

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.

Adding Fonts to JDK 1.2+

In JDK 1.2+ you can access fonts either by logical-Java 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 code point 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 logical Unicode font.

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. 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.

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.

What Fonts Are Available?

In JDK 1.1, use
```
// now deprecated
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.

In JDK 1.2+ you can discover the supported fonts this way:

import java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment;

public class ShowFonts
   {
   public static void main ( String [] args )
      {
      GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
      String[] names = ge.getAvailableFontFamilyNames();
      for ( int i=0; i<names.length; i++ )
         {
         System.out.println( names[i] );
         }
      }
   }

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 JDK 1.4+ and perhaps earlier you also have: Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter.
Use the Font Shower Amanuensis to show you what fonts are available, and what they look like in various style, sizes and colours.

Font name vs family vs fontname.

// font name vs family vs fontname
Font f = new Font( "Courier", Font.ITALIC , 18 );

// prints "Courier", what you originally asked for
System.out.println( f.getName() );

// prints "monospaced", the family you actually got
System.out.println( f.getFamily() );

// prints "monospaced.italic", includes style you got
System.out.println( f.getFontName());

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. 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.

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.

Ugly Fonts -- Antialiasing

For some unknown reason, Sun decided to make fonts ugly by default, with jagged edges. To anti-alias them, you have to go through a gambit like this:

// antialiasing fonts to get rid of the jaggies
Graphics g =...;
Graphics2D g2d = null;
if ( g instanceof Graphics2D )
   {
   g2d = (Graphics2D)g;
   g2d.addRenderingHints( new RenderingHints( RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING ,
                                              RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON ));
   }

I don't know if this is sufficient to make the rendering engine pay attention to the font hints for small point sizes.

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.

Here are some resources if you want to attempt multi-lingual fonts. I have only got Unicode fonts to display properly with NT and Win2K and Internet Explorer. Windows 98 else displays accented letters above 255 without the accents.

Acquiring Fonts

Unfortunately, when you buy a font that usually gives you the right to use it on your computer, but not to let people download it to view your webpages, or to include it in your programs. Usually you would be permitted to include them in PDF documents. Bitstream has a scheme of downloadable fonts called webfonts that you can include in your web pages.

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 Il1i|, wW, O0o8 or gq 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.

Most fonts are poorly designed so it is hard to tell the characters iI!|l and 0O8 apart. Tiresias is a special font designed so that even the visually impaired can distinguish them. It looks like this:

If you already have it installed, all the type on this page will look similar. It is the default font for my website.

Nicksfonts.com has a collection of freeware fonts.

Readable Fonts

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 somewhat with graphics2D.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON ); as described earlier.

Most fonts don't support many of the national currency symbols. Tahoma is better than most.

Corrupt Fonts

On Windows, sometimes strange rendering problems are caused by a corrupt font cache. You can simply delete it, sacrifice a small reptile and reboot.

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.

Font Licensing

I have been trying to make sense of the legalese on the font sites such as BitStream, 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 20 people at your site to compose new messages or documents using the font without a multi-user licence.

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 up 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.

Learning More

Ask Google to help you find free fonts.

Adobe Type Manager ¤ Canvas ¤ dynamic fonts ¤ encoding ¤ font finder student project ¤ Font Shower Amanuensis ¤ Font Shower Student Project ¤ FontMetrics ¤ FontSaver to reduce RAM usage by Java fonts ¤ Hershey Fonts (platform independent and rotatable) ¤ HTML Cheat Sheet: for a list of fonts supported in your browser ¤ Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell on Fonts ¤ MICR ¤ OpenType ¤ point ¤ PostScript ¤ Suitcase ¤ Sun's essay on how to add new fonts to JDK 1.2. To quickly switch between sets of fonts ¤ Tiresias ¤ TrueType ¤ Webfont

home	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[24.87.56.253]
	Your IP:[80.134.30.163]
	You are visitor number 6050.
	Please send errors, omissions and suggestions
	to improve this page to Roedy Green.
	You can get a fresh copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive mirror:
	http://mindprod.com/jgloss/font.html	J:\mindprod\jgloss\font.html