Chet Haase's Blog

Old JavaOne Presentations Never Die

The presentation that Doug Felt, Phil Race, and I did in 2005 has the best description+diagrams of text measurement in Java 2D that I have seen. It's so useful, in fact, that I put a link to the talk in one of the footnotes of the book (footnote 15, p. 78). (By the way, the great text descriptions were all due to Phil and Doug - I was just blathering on about graphics and animation, which should come as a shock to absolutely nobody).

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the link was dead and that the presentation is no longer available on the JavaOne site. Apparently, there is a 2-year-archive policy, so all of the 2005 presentations are no longer stored. Maybe they figure that content that old can't possibly be relevant anymore, but for presentations on APIs that live longer than 2 years, that's not necessarily true.

Anyway, I am posting the talk here mostly so that I can post a hopefully more permanent link in a corrected footnote (for the third printing, which is apparently going to press soon!). But I encourage you to take a look at the presentation if you're interested in text measurement (or Graphics Effects or Text Rendering or Printing, which we also cover in the slides). People that follow my blog and book will see some earlier versions of Filthy Rich topics in my slides. For example, the original work in Animated Transitions came out of work related to this presentation - it just took a bit more time to settle down into the utility library that is discussed in the book and published on the project site. I was already thinking about filthy rich content; I just needed a catchy name for it...

Here's the presentation: Advanced Java 2D for Desktop Applications.

Enjoy.

Comments

• "The Dawn of the Java Presentations".. That should sell!

  Posted by: trembovetski on November 08, 2007 at 09:26 AM

• Hi Chet--thanks for sharing the doc. Seeing the notes on TextLayout reminds me I wanted to ask--under what circumstances would you use it? I was running a microbenchmark on Flying Saucer XML/CSS renderer the other day and it seemed graphics.drawString() was a small hotspot (the document was pure text, and I was forcing it to update/layout/redraw repeatedly). Does a cached TL have a distinct advantage over direct calls to drawString()? TIA, Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on November 08, 2007 at 11:00 AM

• Patrick: it depends on the text. For latin-1 text with a single font and style Graphics2D.drawString is probably most efficient-- glyph selection and positioning is simple and the extra overhead of creating a TextLayout doesn't buy you anything. For other scripts it will depend on the size of the text and the complexity of the script/font.

  Of course, performance will also vary with the JVM and Java version.

  Posted by: dougfelt on November 08, 2007 at 12:38 PM

• It would appear that the final presentation (PDF link) is a little different from your link, especially in the text measurement section. It has much more technical information, along with a lot of screenshots and code samples.

  Posted by: kirillcool on November 29, 2007 at 03:47 PM

• Thanks, Kirill - I grabbed the latest edit that I had, but we apparently changed more stuff between that version and the final one that we gave at the conference.

  Posted by: chet on November 29, 2007 at 04:24 PM

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