Java Cookbook

Program: Custom Font Chooser

Problem

You want to allow the user to select a font, but standard Java doesn’t yet include a Font Chooser dialog.

Solution

Use my FontChooser dialog class.

Discussion

As we saw in Section 12.4, you can manually select a font by calling the java.awt.Font class constructor, passing in the name of the font, the type you want (plain, bold, italic, or bold+italic), and the point size:

Font f = new Font("Helvetica", Font.BOLD, 14);
setfont(f);

But this is not very flexible for interactive applications. You normally want the user to be able to choose fonts with the same ease as using a File Chooser dialog. Until the Java API catches up with this, you are more than welcome to use the Font Chooser that I wrote when faced with a similar need.

The source code is shown in Example 13-7; it ends, as many of my classes do, with a short main method that is both a test case and an example of using the class in action. The display is shown in Figure 13-13.

Example 13-7. FontChooser.java

import com.darwinsys.util.*; import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import javax.swing.*; /** A font selection dialog. AWT version. * <p>Note: can take a LONG time to start up on systems * with (literally) hundreds of fonts. */ public class FontChooser extends Dialog { /** The font the user has chosen */ protected Font resultFont; /** The resulting font name */ protected String resultName; /** The resulting font size */ protected int resultSize; /** The resulting boldness */ protected boolean ...