I am running into some annoyances with the way fonts are handled. This may 
be because of the way Excel works, or because of the way POI is designed, 
or because I am doing the wrong thing.

I am writing a report to track employee leave. The spec is simple:

- unapproved leave should appear in italics. Approved leave is in normal 
font.
- leave without pay should appear in green. Other leave is in black.

So for example unapproved leave without pay would be both in italics and 
green.

In my first attempt, I created a new font for every cell, and set the 
values accordingly. However, Excel seems to have  a limit on the number of 
fonts in a spreadsheet. I get this message when I open the spreadsheet 

"Some formatting may have changed in this file because the number of fonts 
was exceeded".

To use only the number of fonts I need, I've had to create a seperate font 
for every possible combination of leave types and status.

i.e.

HSSFFont approvedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont unapprovedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont approvedLeaveWithoutPay;
HSSFFont unapprovedLeaveWithoutPay;

This seems to work OK. It's very nasty though, with a nice big 
if-then-else statement to work out which of the four fonts I need.
It also won't scale. If they later decide that, for example, all leave on 
mondays or fridays needs to be in bold, I will then have to double the 
number of fonts again!

i.e

HSSFFont approvedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont unapprovedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont approvedLeaveWithoutPay;
HSSFFont unapprovedLeaveWithoutPay;
HSSFFont mondayApprovedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont mondayUnapprovedNormalLeave;
HSSFFont mondayApprovedLeaveWithoutPay;
HSSFFont mondayUnapprovedLeaveWithoutPay;

So my question is, is there a way to create and use fonts "on the fly" on 
a per cell basis? Or am I forced to pre-create a global list of all the 
possible fonts I might need?

Thanks for any replies.

Andreas.

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