Don't you hate it when someone is a developer, but they run into an end-user-type problem, and they post it to a developer forum anyway because they know that's where they'll get the real answers? Yeah, me too. So anyway:
I've been using Eclipse for years on Windows XP SP2, no problems, but I wanted to try out NetBeans, which uses Swing instead of SWT. Oof! All the small (18pt and below) bold fonts looked chunky, blocky, almost like dot-matrix pseudo-bold. I knew J2SE 5 had some subpixel-rendering issues, but I thought 6 was supposed to Fix Everything. So I did some playing around with the helpful FontShower app: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/fontshower.html - With Windows Display - Appearance - Effects font smoothing set to "ClearType", Monospaced bold 13 looks chunky in Swing (irrespective of Swing anti-aliasing settings) and normal in AWT. (By "normal", I mean "roughly identical to Windows Notepad". I cannot compare "Monospaced" in Windows Notepad, since it doesn't exist, but I can compare it to Courier New, which is either really close or the same font under the covers.) - With Windows Display - Appearance - Effects font smoothing unchecked, Monospaced bold 13 looks chunky in both. This happens on two Windows XP SP2 installations - one on a real PC with JRE 1.5.0_06, and one on a virtualized Parallels installation with JRE 1.6.0_02 (MacBook Pro 17", OS X 10.4.10, Parallels 5158, full-screen mode). So it seems like Swing is not properly applying/emulating native font smoothing to bold fonts, while AWT is. And that this has been the case at least as far back as 1.5. And not fixed in 6. I find that hard to believe, so I must be doing something wrong. Please, God, let me be doing something wrong, because I wanna use a Swing app and not have my eyes hurt. You can see a screen shot of Swing vs AWT with Cleartype enabled here: http://www.jay.fm/files/swing-vs-awt.png And Swing against Windows Notepad here: http://www.jay.fm/files/chunky-bold.png I posted this originally to the Swing/AWT forum, but they suggested I repost here. I've searched the bug database and found some old mentions of "algorithmic bolding" but I don't know when or why that happens. Interestingly (to me, at least), but probably unrelated - I tried this with the Font2DTest demo, and discovered that "antialiasing=default" was the same as "antialiasing=off", even though I'm running on Windows XP SP2 on an LCD display with ClearType turned on. And that remained true even when I explicitly specified -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd on the command line. You can see my Font2DTest chunky boldness here: http://www.jay.fm/files/font2d.png Can anyone render (ha!) some assistance? [Message sent by forum member 'jay_levitt' (jay_levitt)] http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=234744 =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA2D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
