Re: [JAVA2D] Text rendering: small font size give bad results.

[Stefan Frank]

Just guessing: But I'm not sure, that this has something to do with
java2d - If you try to anti-alias fonts of small size, you always end up
 with bad results, no matter what platform you use. It's just a
question of how many pixels you have for display of the glyph&for the
anti-aliasing. Maybe trying a pixel-font (A font designed to look good
at a fixed font-size and/or switching of anti-aliasing for small sizes
will fix this.
Olof Andersson wrote:
Hi all, I'm building an app with a zoomable interface and I'm getting quite poor 
results when rendering text(AttributedStrings, actually) when the font size gets small.
 I know this topic was briefly discussed during the Java2D BOF at this years JavaOne, 
and the problem was put down to a bug that probably wouldn't get fixed until the 
release of 1.5. Any news on this issue? Is it a platform-specific problem(I'm running 
1.4.2 on win2k)?
Tips for workarounds to increase rendering quality would be greatly appreciated!
Here's a code snippet that shows the problem. Run the applet, change fontsize by right-clicking and watch a significant change in quality between fontsize 11 and 10.

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.font.*;
import java.text.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class FontSizeTest extends Applet {
  private boolean isStandalone = false;
  int fontSize = 12;
  AttributedString attributedString;
  TextLayout textLayout;
  String theString = "How come font size < 11 looks crappy?";
  //Construct the applet
  public FontSizeTest() {
    addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
      public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) {
        if(e.isPopupTrigger()){
          JPopupMenu pM = new JPopupMenu();
          JMenu fontSizeMenu = new JMenu("Set font size");
          for(int i = 5; i < 16; i++){
            final int fs = i;
            fontSizeMenu.add(new AbstractAction("Font size " + fs){
              public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){
                fontSize = fs;
                attributedString = null;
                textLayout = null;
                repaint();
              }
            });
          }
          pM.add(fontSizeMenu);
          pM.show(FontSizeTest.this,e.getX(), e.getY());
        }
      }
    });
  }
  public void paint(Graphics g){
    Dimension d = getSize();
    int w = d.width;
    int h = d.height;
    Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g;
    g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING, 
RenderingHints.VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
    g2.setColor(Color.black);
    g2.fillRect(0, 0, w, h);
    drawString(g2);
  }
  private void drawString(Graphics2D gr){
    if(attributedString == null || textLayout == null){
      attributedString = new AttributedString(theString);
      attributedString.addAttribute(TextAttribute.UNDERLINE, 
TextAttribute.UNDERLINE_ON);
      attributedString.addAttribute(TextAttribute.FOREGROUND, Color.white);
      attributedString.addAttribute(TextAttribute.BACKGROUND, Color.black);
      attributedString.addAttribute(TextAttribute.FONT, new Font("Arial", Font.BOLD, 
fontSize));
      textLayout = new TextLayout(attributedString.getIterator(), 
gr.getFontRenderContext());
    }
    textLayout.draw(gr, (int)(getWidth()/2 - textLayout.getBounds().getWidth()/2), 
getHeight()/2);
  }


  //Main method
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FontSizeTest applet = new FontSizeTest();
    applet.isStandalone = true;
    Frame frame;
    frame = new Frame();
    frame.setTitle("Font size test");
    frame.add(applet, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    applet.init();
    applet.start();
    frame.setSize(400,320);
    Dimension d = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
    frame.setLocation((d.width - frame.getSize().width) / 2, (d.height - 
frame.getSize().height) / 2);
    frame.setVisible(true);
    frame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
      public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
        System.exit(0);
      }
    });
  }
}


Thanks,
Olof
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