java.awt
Class Font

java.lang.Object   
  java.awt.Font

All Implemented Interfaces:

Serializable

Direct Known Subclasses:

FontUIResource

public class Font
extends Object   
implements Serializable   

The Font class represents fonts, which are used to render text in a visible way. A font provides the information needed to map sequences of characters to sequences of glyphs and to render sequences of glyphs on Graphics and Component objects.

Characters and Glyphs

A character is a symbol that represents an item such as a letter, a digit, or punctuation in an abstract way. For example, 'g', LATIN SMALL LETTER G, is a character.

A glyph is a shape used to render a character or a sequence of characters. In simple writing systems, such as Latin, typically one glyph represents one character. In general, however, characters and glyphs do not have one-to-one correspondence. For example, the character 'á' LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE, can be represented by two glyphs: one for 'a' and one for '´'. On the other hand, the two-character string "fi" can be represented by a single glyph, an "fi" ligature. In complex writing systems, such as Arabic or the South and South-East Asian writing systems, the relationship between characters and glyphs can be more complicated and involve context-dependent selection of glyphs as well as glyph reordering. A font encapsulates the collection of glyphs needed to render a selected set of characters as well as the tables needed to map sequences of characters to corresponding sequences of glyphs.

Physical and Logical Fonts

The Java 2 platform distinguishes between two kinds of fonts: physical fonts and logical fonts.

Physical fonts are the actual font libraries containing glyph data and tables to map from character sequences to glyph sequences, using a font technology such as TrueType or PostScript Type 1. All implementations of the Java 2 platform must support TrueType fonts; support for other font technologies is implementation dependent. Physical fonts may use names such as Helvetica, Palatino, HonMincho, or any number of other font names. Typically, each physical font supports only a limited set of writing systems, for example, only Latin characters or only Japanese and Basic Latin. The set of available physical fonts varies between configurations. Applications that require specific fonts can bundle them and instantiate them using the createFont method.

Logical fonts are the five font families defined by the Java platform which must be supported by any Java runtime environment: Serif, SansSerif, Monospaced, Dialog, and DialogInput. These logical fonts are not actual font libraries. Instead, the logical font names are mapped to physical fonts by the Java runtime environment. The mapping is implementation and usually locale dependent, so the look and the metrics provided by them vary. Typically, each logical font name maps to several physical fonts in order to cover a large range of characters.

Peered AWT components, such as Label and TextField , can only use logical fonts.

For a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of using physical or logical fonts, see the Internationalization FAQ document.

Font Faces and Names

A Font can have many faces, such as heavy, medium, oblique, gothic and regular. All of these faces have similar typographic design.

There are three different names that you can get from a Font object. The logical font name is simply the name that was used to construct the font. The font face name, or just font name for short, is the name of a particular font face, like Helvetica Bold. The family name is the name of the font family that determines the typographic design across several faces, like Helvetica.

The Font class represents an instance of a font face from a collection of font faces that are present in the system resources of the host system. As examples, Arial Bold and Courier Bold Italic are font faces. There can be several Font objects associated with a font face, each differing in size, style, transform and font features. The getAllFonts method of the GraphicsEnvironment class returns an array of all font faces available in the system. These font faces are returned as Font objects with a size of 1, identity transform and default font features. These base fonts can then be used to derive new Font objects with varying sizes, styles, transforms and font features via the deriveFont methods in this class.

See Also:

Serialized Form

Field Summary

static int	BOLD The bold style constant.
static int	CENTER_BASELINE The baseline used in ideographic scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean when laying out text.
static int	HANGING_BASELINE The baseline used in Devanigiri and similar scripts when laying out text.
static int	ITALIC The italicized style constant.
static int	LAYOUT_LEFT_TO_RIGHT A flag to layoutGlyphVector indicating that text is left-to-right as determined by Bidi analysis.
static int	LAYOUT_NO_LIMIT_CONTEXT A flag to layoutGlyphVector indicating that text in the char array after the indicated limit should not be examined.
static int	LAYOUT_NO_START_CONTEXT A flag to layoutGlyphVector indicating that text in the char array before the indicated start should not be examined.
static int	LAYOUT_RIGHT_TO_LEFT A flag to layoutGlyphVector indicating that text is right-to-left as determined by Bidi analysis.
protected String	name The logical name of this Font, as passed to the constructor.
static int	PLAIN The plain style constant.
protected float	pointSize The point size of this Font in float.
static int	ROMAN_BASELINE The baseline used in most Roman scripts when laying out text.
protected int	size The point size of this Font, rounded to integer.
protected int	style The style of this Font, as passed to the constructor.
static int	TRUETYPE_FONT Identify a font resource of type TRUETYPE.
static int	TYPE1_FONT Identify a font resource of type TYPE1.

Constructor Summary

Font (Map <? extends AttributedCharacterIterator.Attribute ,?> attributes)
Creates a new Font with the specified attributes.

Font (String name, int style, int size)
Creates a new Font from the specified name, style and point size.

Method Summary

boolean	canDisplay (char c) Checks if this Font has a glyph for the specified character.
boolean	canDisplay (int codePoint) Checks if this Font has a glyph for the specified character.
int	canDisplayUpTo (char[] text, int start, int limit) Indicates whether or not this Font can display the characters in the specified text starting at start and ending at limit.
int	canDisplayUpTo (CharacterIterator iter, int start, int limit) Indicates whether or not this Font can display the text specified by the iter starting at start and ending at limit.
int	canDisplayUpTo (String str) Indicates whether or not this Font can display a specified String.
static Font	createFont (int fontFormat, File fontFile) Returns a new Font using the specified font type and the specified font file.
static Font	createFont (int fontFormat, InputStream fontStream) Returns a new Font using the specified font type and input data.
GlyphVector	createGlyphVector (FontRenderContext frc, char[] chars) Creates a GlyphVector by mapping characters to glyphs one-to-one based on the Unicode cmap in this Font.
GlyphVector	createGlyphVector (FontRenderContext frc, CharacterIterator ci) Creates a GlyphVector by mapping the specified characters to glyphs one-to-one based on the Unicode cmap in this Font.
GlyphVector	createGlyphVector (FontRenderContext frc, int[] glyphCodes) Creates a GlyphVector by mapping characters to glyphs one-to-one based on the Unicode cmap in this Font.
GlyphVector	createGlyphVector (FontRenderContext frc, String str) Creates a GlyphVector by mapping characters to glyphs one-to-one based on the Unicode cmap in this Font.
static Font	decode (String str) Returns the Font that the str argument describes.
Font	deriveFont (AffineTransform trans) Creates a new Font object by replicating the current Font object and applying a new transform to it.
Font	deriveFont (float size) Creates a new Font object by replicating the current Font object and applying a new size to it.
Font	deriveFont (int style) Creates a new Font object by replicating the current Font object and applying a new style to it.
Font	deriveFont (int style, AffineTransform trans) Creates a new Font object by replicating this Font object and applying a new style and transform.
Font	deriveFont (int style, float size) Creates a new Font object by replicating this Font object and applying a new style and size.
Font	deriveFont (Map <? extends AttributedCharacterIterator.Attribute ,?> attributes) Creates a new Font object by replicating the current Font object and applying a new set of font attributes to it.
boolean	equals (Object obj) Compares this Font object to the specified Object.
protected void	finalize () Disposes the native Font object.
Map <TextAttribute ,?>	getAttributes () Returns a map of font attributes available in this Font.
AttributedCharacterIterator.Attribute []	getAvailableAttributes () Returns the keys of all the attributes supported by this Font.
byte	getBaselineFor (char c) Returns the baseline appropriate for displaying this character.
String	getFamily () Returns the family name of this Font.
String	getFamily (Locale l) Returns the family name of this Font, localized for the specified locale.
static Font	getFont (Map <? extends AttributedCharacterIterator.Attribute ,?> attributes) Returns a Font appropriate to this attribute set.
static Font	getFont (String nm) Returns a Font object from the system properties list.
static Font	getFont (String nm, Font font) Gets the specified Font from the system properties list.
String	getFontName () Returns the font face name of this Font.
String	getFontName (Locale l) Returns the font face name of the Font, localized for the specified locale.
float	getItalicAngle () Returns the italic angle of this Font.
LineMetrics	getLineMetrics (char[] chars, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns a LineMetrics object created with the specified arguments.
LineMetrics	getLineMetrics (CharacterIterator ci, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns a LineMetrics object created with the specified arguments.
LineMetrics	getLineMetrics (String str, FontRenderContext frc) Returns a LineMetrics object created with the specified String and FontRenderContext .
LineMetrics	getLineMetrics (String str, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns a LineMetrics object created with the specified arguments.
Rectangle2D	getMaxCharBounds (FontRenderContext frc) Returns the bounds for the character with the maximum bounds as defined in the specified FontRenderContext.
int	getMissingGlyphCode () Returns the glyphCode which is used when this Font does not have a glyph for a specified unicode.
String	getName () Returns the logical name of this Font.
int	getNumGlyphs () Returns the number of glyphs in this Font.
FontPeer	getPeer () Deprecated. Font rendering is now platform independent.
String	getPSName () Returns the postscript name of this Font.
int	getSize () Returns the point size of this Font, rounded to an integer.
float	getSize2D () Returns the point size of this Font in float value.
Rectangle2D	getStringBounds (char[] chars, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns the logical bounds of the specified array of characters in the specified FontRenderContext.
Rectangle2D	getStringBounds (CharacterIterator ci, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns the logical bounds of the characters indexed in the specified CharacterIterator in the specified FontRenderContext.
Rectangle2D	getStringBounds (String str, FontRenderContext frc) Returns the logical bounds of the specified String in the specified FontRenderContext.
Rectangle2D	getStringBounds (String str, int beginIndex, int limit, FontRenderContext frc) Returns the logical bounds of the specified String in the specified FontRenderContext.