Java Font Changes (in Ubuntu)
Developer's Cave January 30th. 2010, 2:03pmI updated my development platform to Java 1.6.0_18 and noticed a disturbing font alteration in all Java applications. I’m developing in Ubuntu 9.10, which currently bundles Java 1.6.0_15 (in the sun-java6-jdk package), so I manually installed the latest for testing.
I have yet (since yesterday) to investigate whether this is Ubuntu specific. Font configuration changes were noted in the Java 1.6.0_18 Release Notes, associated with a particular bug.
Preliminary investigation implies that Java’s attitude toward font consistency has changed over time. Early Java 1.3 Physical Fonts documentation makes clear that:
The SDK’s physical fonts offer … Consistent Look and Feel: Your applications will look the same on all platforms because they will be using the same fonts. This makes testing, deployment, and support easier in a cross-platform environment.
In contrast, a more recent bug submission was thoroughly thrashed for suggesting that fonts should remain consistent across platforms and versions. This seems to contradict one of the primary tenets of the Java platform: “Write once, run anywhere”
In the future, I’ll be looking into explicitly loading a specific font set, possibly by embedding custom fonts within my application.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Hi,
I also noticed that all java apps have an increased font size since update to jdk 1.6.0_18 (I’m also using Ubuntu 9.10). But (even more disturbing) at several points the fonts now look unaliased.
Did you find out how to beautify the java fonts again?
Greets
marp
March 4th, 2010 at 10:07 am
Thanks for the confirmation of this issue, marp. I had not noticed the non-anti-aliasing. I have not yet investigated how to fix this font issue. All I know is that moving back to a prior release avoids the issue (so it’s not just Ubuntu, but is tied to the Java version). I’ll have to submit a bug report on this…