Swing Hacks

Anti-Aliased Text Without Code #54

Chapter 7, Text

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HACK

H A C K

#54

Anti-Aliased Text Without Code

Hack #54

Draw anti-aliased text without any code changes at all using two clever tricks

introduced in Java 5.0.

Since Java 1.2, UI programmers can draw anti-aliased text. Unfortunately,

anti-aliasing must be enabled for every Swing component by writing a few

lines of code for each of them

[Hack #53]. This hack describes a clever way to

turn on anti-aliasing for an entire frame by adding a customized repaint

manager. As every programmer seeks for effortless solutions, we will dis-

cover how to do the same without writing any lines of code.

The Java 5.0 Trick

Sun Microsystems released Java 5.0, a.k.a. Tiger, in September 2004.

Among many improvements, like a new theme for the Metal L&F, this

release of J2SE paves the way for application-wide text anti-aliasing support

in Mustang, the upcoming release of Java. To this end, the Swing team

added a special field in the hidden class

com.sun.java.swing.SwingUtilities2.

Meant for internal purposes only, this class is left undocumented by Sun’s

engineering teams.

If you look closely at its source code, provided in src.zip with Sun’s JVM,

you’ll discover a very interesting method:

drawTextAntialiased(JComponent c).

This method returns a

boolean value used by Swing’s painting framework to

know whether the specified component must be drawn with anti-aliased

text. Here ...