I agree with CAS. Antialiased fonts would greately help the whole look of swing apps and wouldn’t cost that much (and it’s getting better, according to the last 1.5 fonts improvements).
Fonts AA could be controlled by a swing system property so we could easily allow users to use them by simply selecting a checkbox in the application prefs.
Mik
Just tried it on Linux box. Actually very nice (on CRT) and surprisingly fast (as opposed to what I’ve seen on windows so far). Now, if only you would honor KDE AA settings in final release, it would be almost perfect (perfect would be if KDE themes were supported)
Finally. Especially nice to see you are working on AA for LCD screens. Adding kerning to the text layout would be nice too.
BTW, I know there is a Swing command line switch somewhere in beta2. Care to share that with us? Pretty please?
Wouldn’t it be nice to, in the Java Control Panel, have some choice:
(This all have to be written in “boring natural language” though)
The default value could then be tweaked to a more aggressive setting as we move towards a better (more good looking and higher performant) implementation.
If done like this, there would be no more to bitch about concerning AA fonts, everybody could have their own way! This would be good, cause then we can bitch about something else instead! Like GregorianCalendar! 
Cheers,
Mikael
(Feeling cranky today)
For some of the reasons on why AA text is not enabled on windows check out this bug (and its many duplicates):
4502804: FontSmoothing/AntiAlias not utilized by default despite OS setting
[quote]For some of the reasons on why AA text is not enabled on windows check out this bug (and its many duplicates):
4502804: FontSmoothing/AntiAlias not utilized by default despite OS setting
[/quote]
I can’t find any reason there explaining why AA fonts aren’t enabled on Win. Just a requests to make it happen. Are you sure we are seeing a same Bug page?
Take a look at Phi’s explanation in the evaluation.
The main idea I wanted to convey is that it’s not as easy as just flipping a switch.
[quote]Take a look at Phi’s explanation in the evaluation.
The main idea I wanted to convey is that it’s not as easy as just flipping a switch.
[/quote]
Evaluation that I (we outside the Sun) can see is “This is an interesting idea that deserves further investigation.
xxxxx@xxxxx 2001-11-14”
I assume that you are seeing some internal comment than we can’t reach. I do know AA is a complicated beast to do right. However, I clearly can see that some form of switch for current implementation is there, because you are doing it on Gnome. Btw, wasn’t there some STSF stuff from Sun that was ment to address portable font rendering for Java/Star(Open)Office?
Duh! I guess it hasn’t been synched to the internal dbase yet. Check it later today…
I still can’t see what possible excuse there is for not enabling font antialiasing in Swing by default on all platforms. Right now I have to do it manually with lots of hackery and trickery with the look & feel code, and it’s very annoying.
Cas
Small sans serif AA fonts (especially if it’s not BLACK/WHITE fg/bg and even more so on a TFT) look crap i think but bold larger fonts are beatiful, that’s why i don’t think they can be just turned on by default, cause it would make some dialogs look bad.
A lot of settings to tune it, that’s the way to go i believe.
soo… a little late and back on topic:
Could not enable OpenGL pipeline for default config on screen 0
I get that on my 64mb 3D Graphics card with OpenGL 1.3 drivers.
What card is it? ATI perhaps?
Intel graphics controller on my laptop
Oh… and what about mac’s?
Amazing. And here we are on OS X… Still no hardware acceleration on 1.4.2. Still no 1.5. Still so many bugs introduced with each update.
Maybe sun should be in charge of java for OS X as it’s practically useless for games in java, unless you write an OpenGL 2D layer, which shouldn’t be neccesary.
Oh well
[quote]Amazing. And here we are on OS X… Still no hardware acceleration on 1.4.2. Still no 1.5. Still so many bugs introduced with each update.
[/quote]
There is no 1.5 on any other platform either. If you are counting Betas, then there IS a Java 5 beta available for OS X.
[quote]Maybe sun should be in charge of java for OS X as it’s practically useless for games in java, unless you write an OpenGL 2D layer, which shouldn’t be neccesary.
[/quote]
It has actually improved significantly. given that Apple has more limited resources to do the port than Sun they have had to make some difficult decisions. They are implementing much of the graphics in 1.4 on the Core Graphics APIs, which are also not hardware accelerated. They are (rightly IMHO) working to accelerate their core APIs so that everything benefits.
Java 5 will have the OpenGL pipeline which should work nicely (or be a pain?) with OS X as the Quartz rendering technology is OpenGL based as well.
I don’t mean to apologize for Apple… they are behind. But they know it and they are working on it at least.
As far as the OpenGL layer - you don’t have to write it - JOGL is already done for you. It is the API that is most suitable for games (2D or 3D) that need high performance graphics. Use it.
You are right. I meant no disrespect. It’s good that java has such great java support. It’s just sad to have such poor performance on OS X, but that will soon change with 1.5
With regards to jogl it’s too much work to change my engine to use it, but thanks for the heads up.
I do hope that java 1.5 will work on previous versions on OS X and not just Tiger…
[quote]I do hope that java 1.5 will work on previous versions on OS X and not just Tiger…
[/quote]
Sadly, I think that will be highly unlikely. Apple doesn’t tend to develop for anything but their latest OS. So since Tiger the OS is due out around the same time that Tiger i.e. Java 5… and the current preview already is for the Tiger OS only… well it wouldn’t follow Apple’s previous pattern.
I did some poking around with the openGL pipeline and discovered the size of your images make a huge deal. I believe its tied to the fact that they need to be in powers of 2, if not you see a big performance hit.
Here is a link to a small thread at JavaRanch which tried to get some info on the openGL pipeline -
[link=http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=009180]JR Link[/link]
There are some performance numbers on the thread.
Regards,
Dr. A>
I hope they’re taking advantage of the extensions allowing non-power-of-two textures.
And I hope they’re querying the max texture sizes too. 256x256 hasn’t been the limit since the heady days of the Voodoo cards.
Cas
Oh well. PC with Windoze for me that is. Sad…