Romain Guy's Blog

NetBeans with anti aliasing

I have Mustang as my primary VM for work and personal use. Yet I had to reinstall Tiger to be able to run NetBeans 5.0 beta2 properly because I kept getting a nasty exception regarding some XML things. Anyway, I couldn't use NB on Mustang, meaning I couldn't benefit from the subpixel anti aliasing. Hopefully, the NB guys told me today it is a bug in the JDK itself and it has been fixed in b61 so I installed a nightly build of Mustang b65 and it now works perfectly!

It looks so much better now! Unfortunately there is still a bug in Mustang's rasterizer which makes my favorite fixed width font (BitStream Vera Sans Mono free, GPL font) look really bad at small sizes.

Comments

• Hello!

  Have you ever tried the monospaced font "Anonymous" by Mark Simonson? I have not found a better font to date for coding, and I sure have tried a lot of them -- including Vera mono.

  As I indicated to the font's author when thanking him for the free resource, it strikes a very nice balance between a serif and sans serif style to make the monospaced letter pacing very comfortable when it comes to readability.

  Some serif-style monospaced fonts -- like I guess a "typewriter" style; like Courier -- are ragged: some letters are just blurry and fall out of the flow as you read; and in general they flow inconsistently. Most sans styles are just not readable enough in a comfortable way. Vera is among the best sans styles I think, but it does not match the comfortable readability of Anonymous.

  And the venerable console styles like ProFont just fall by the wayside when you want to use a more "normal" antialiased setting. I think the sans styles suffer from some of the same problems these types suffer from: with these you have this situation where you find yourself focused on just deciphering the glyph as if it were given some weighty drama within your code: With the nicer font you can read more easily and be sure you have interpreted the glyphs correctly, and so your brain does less work while you're coding -- ouch!

  Lastly it is actually a bit less heavy. This will likely work better with sub-pixel aliasing: in a good resolution setting, finer fonts can hold up better without "disappearing" at those heavily-antialiased angle segments or such. You probably have a nice monitor capable of good resolution and a nice fine font that does render with good readability will ask less of your eyeballs!

  Anyway, it is a nice font to give a try, and Mr. Simonson has given it to us for free! See if you find it here: http://www.ms-studio.com/ And maybe you'll switch back and forth and keep us all on our toes a bit more. Maybe I'll start a Java.Net project with an editor that randomly picks a font for each file you open...

  Oh yes, one other thing: Dude: seriously; only socially-inept Dweebs use Vera Mono. OK?

  Later...
  Steev Coco.

  Posted by: steevcoco on January 02, 2006 at 05:06 PM

• As much as I love serif fonts to read long piece of text (articles, books, whatever), I prefer the BitStream Vera Sans Mono for code. I just tried Anonymous with Eclipse and here is what it looks like.

  So I prefer the Vera Sans Mono. Sans styles usually work best for large types on short text but Vera Sans Mono still remains my favorite fixed width and I tried a lot of them!

  Posted by: gfx on January 02, 2006 at 05:16 PM

• AFAIK with Mustang build 62 onwards there is a bug that causes the right-click --> New submenu in the Project View not to render at all, that is why I'm still on b61 till today...

  Posted by: alexlamsl on January 02, 2006 at 05:29 PM

• 2alexlamsl: I do not see this bug on solaris (with GTK L&F)
  Dmitri
  Java2D Team
  

  Posted by: trembovetski on January 02, 2006 at 05:42 PM

• Re: Anonymous:

  Here's an A/B comparison at the size I run it at -- a bit larger.

  Thanks buddy.
  Steev Coco.

  Posted by: steevcoco on January 02, 2006 at 09:33 PM

• I agree - the improved font rendering in Mustang is such a welcome addition. The fact that it's there by default is nice - no more -Dswing.aatext=true for me!

  I think that this will in fact prove very important for Java's push on to the desktop in the coming years. The old jagged fonts didn't bother me too much, but I had to agree that they looked out-dated.

  I think that users often make decisions in a subconscious way, and all those little details like anti-aliasing, baseline alignment, colour schemes, etc, etc all contribute to what makes a user feel comfortable. Some may call it eye-candy, but I personally don't think these aspects should be underestimated and so it's good to see these types of features coming to the fore in Mustang.

  Posted by: arooaroo on January 03, 2006 at 05:47 AM

• 2alexlamsl: indeed this is a known bug, as others pointed out:
  http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6359669
  Dmitri
  

  Posted by: trembovetski on January 03, 2006 at 08:14 AM

• Yeah, no more -Dswing.aatext=true now. Sweet! And the truetype support in mustang is also an great gift for all of us.

  BTW, Romain, what's the theme (the JFrame) you use? I saw may times on your previous blog entries. It looks pretty nice.

  Posted by: tzutolin on January 04, 2006 at 07:11 PM

• It's called Royale, it's a Microsoft theme.

  Posted by: gfx on January 04, 2006 at 08:38 PM

• Great, thanks a lot!

  Posted by: tzutolin on January 04, 2006 at 09:31 PM

• Why don't they (Sun Java developers) simply provide the option of using the OS native font rendering? When I enable anti-aliasing on Netbeans 4 (or 5, using either Java 1.4 or 1.5) scrooling the editor windows becomes too slow to be acceptable. Most of the time we differences between native font rendering won't harm anyone as long as fontmetrics are reported right and people use layout managers instead of null layout.

  Posted by: flozano on January 05, 2006 at 06:11 PM

• Thanks so much for this! This is exactly what I was looking for.
  ///////////////////////////FLV to AVI converterFLV to WMV
  FLV to MPEG
  FLV Converter
  SWF to FLV
  M4V converter
  Ipod to PC
  Ipod to PC transfer
  DVD to iPod AVI to SWF site has all solution on FLV to SWF,
  WMV to SWF, MPEG to SWF,
  3GP to SWF, DivX to SWF,AVI to FLV
  and other video to SWF, FLV ecoded by Java.
  May it Gadgets helpful To your lifestyle... Enjoy！！！
  

  Posted by: quinceseed on June 20, 2008 at 12:36 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.