-phil. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
- 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.)
JDK does use the system's Courier New as the primary font for monospaced (the suggestion from another poster you are getting a Lucida font is incorrect). What this appears to come down to is something MS are doing to make Courier New Bold look less bold, specifically in ClearType mode. If I look at it in either B&W or greyscale antialiasing (aka windows standard font smoothing) then you'll see that notepad is bold. To see what I mean, if you set Courier New Bold at pt size 16 (using 96 dpi) in windows notepad, with set your windows font smoothing initially set to "Standard", its identical to the JDK rendering of the same size (16 pt with AA or GASP in Font2DTest). But if you then change it to "Cleartype" in notepad the text gets noticeably lighter. But I see this only for Courier New Bold. Not all bold fonts. Eg If I use "Microsoft Sans Serif" instead I don't see the same difference. And Tahoma Bold also looks very bold in ClearType mode. So it looks possible that MS special case Courier New Bold in cleartype mode, to make it look thinner , not even really bold. We'd have to look into whether we should do that too, but my initial opinion is that the ClearType rendering is not true to the font.
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: ".
Font2DTest's 'default' means Java 2D's "default" behaviour, not the desktop default ... and the value of default historically and presently in Sun's JDK happens to be "OFF". We've talked about changing that so DEFAULT matches the desktop but have been a bit leery of the compatibility consequences. -phil. =========================================================================== 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".
