Hi all, Recently I was trying to run one nice java application on Harmony that uses East Asian fonts. And I encounter the situation that on some machines (especially that run Windows Server 2003) Harmony displays empty boxes instead of hieroglyphs in menus, button labels and etc. At the same time RI displays valid characters there. Currently we have two issues filed to JIRA about this topic: HARMONY-4713 and HARMONY-4526.
After further investigation I've found that issue is caused by default font configuration mechanism implemented in Harmony. RI has special font configuration files that are described for example in [1]. You can associate several physical fonts with one java logical font in RI. Several physical fonts are needed for covering various character subsets like alphanumeric, Chinese, Arabic and so on. The most surprising thing is that we have font.properties in Harmony too. The format is simpler, but it is implemented nevertheless. However, I neither found any mention about it in our AWT docs [2] nor any sample font.properties files in %JRE_HOME%/lib or elsewhere. This way, I had to study the source code of classes from "org.apache.harmony.awt.gl" and "org.apache.harmony.awt.gl.font" packages in order to learn our own format of font.properties and create the font configuration I need. I don't think we want all our users to go the way I went to create custom font configurations. So I suggest: - Add a description of our format of font.properties to [2] - Create sample font.properties file(s) and place it in %JRE_HOME%/lib - Create default font configurations for all platforms (Windows/Linux/…) in order to be able to handle various languages by default since RI can do this (see abovementioned JIRAs) Thoughts? Suggestions? Objections? [1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/fontconfig.html [2] http://harmony.apache.org/subcomponents/classlibrary/awt.html -- Alexei Zakharov, Intel ESSD
