What is a Font?
A font is a complete set of type in one point size and type face. For
example, all English language characters and symbols in Helvetica 10
point bold face make up a font. The font defines the characteristic look, size,
and style (bold, italics, or plain) of the text string that is drawn with
the font.
How does a font define the characteristic look? A font is created from
glyphs,
and a glyph is a bit-mapped image that defines the appearance of the
characters
or symbols in the font. All fonts within the same font family have a
similar
appearance because they are all made from the same glyph set. Likewise,
different fonts families use different glyph sets to achieve their own
distinguishing look.
A font family not only consists of fonts with a similar appearance, but
also different points sizes and styles. Helvetica 10 point bold and Helvetica
12 point italic are two fonts in the same family, and Times Roman 8 point
bold and Times Roman 10 point regular are two fonts in a different font family.
Find Available Fonts
To use a font, you have to create a Font object, and to do
that, you need to know what fonts are available on the system and
their names. Fonts have logical, family and font names.
The logical name is a name mapped onto one of the specific fonts
available on the platform.
- To get the logical name for a
Font object, call
java.awt.Font.getName
The family name is the name of the font family that determines the
typographic design across several faces, such as Helvetica or Times
Roman.
- To get the family name for a given
Font object, call
java.awt.Font.getFamily.
The font name represents a specific font within a family such as Helvetica Bold.
- To get the font name, call
java.awt.Font.getFontName,
and to determine which font faces are available on a system, call
java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getAllFonts.
Creating and Deriving Fonts
The easiest way to create a font is by specifying the font name, point
size, and style. Once you have a Font object, you can derive
any number of new Font objects by calling
the Font.deriveFont method on the existing font and specifying
a new point size, style, transform (position, slant, scale, or rotation), or
attribute map.
Font boldFont = new Font("Helvetica", Font.BOLD, 12);
Font italicDerived = boldFont.deriveFont(Font.ITALIC, 12);
Font plainDerived = boldFont.deriveFont(Font.PLAIN, 14);
Once you have a font, you can use it to create a TextLayout
object and draw styled text, which are the topics of the next lesson.
