3
Fonts and Colors
In this chapter:
- Fonts
- FontMetrics
- Color
- SystemColor
- Displaying Colors
- Using Desktop Colors
This chapter introduces the java.awt classes that are used to work with different fonts and colors. First, we discuss the Font class, which determines the font used to display text strings, whether they are drawn directly on the screen (with drawString()) or displayed within a component like a text field. The FontMetrics class gives you detailed information about a font, which you can use to position text strings intelligently. Next, the Color class is used to represent colors and can be used to specify the background color of any object, as well as the foreground color used to display a text string or a shape. Finally, the SystemColor class (which is new to Java 1.1) provides access to the desktop color scheme.
3.1 Fonts
An instance of the Font class represents a specific font to the system. Within AWT, a font is specified by its name, style, and point size. Each platform that supports Java provides a basic set of fonts; to find the fonts supported on any platform, call Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getFontList(). This method returns a String array of the fonts available. Under Java 1.0, on any platform, the available fonts were: TimesRoman, Helvetica, Courier, Dialog, DialogInput, and ZapfDingbats. For copyright reasons, the list is substantially different in Java 1.1: the available font names are TimesRoman , Serif, Helvetica , SansSerif, Courier , Monospaced, Dialog, ...
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