[Suggestion] Font handling in CodeDraw: unavailable Fonts, and how to "work around" this issue

[rubyFeedback]

[Suggestion] Font handling in CodeDraw: unavailable Fonts, and how to "work around" this issue

[rubyFeedback]

Hmm. I am also trying other fonts:

"The font URW Palladio is not available on your device."

Or:

"The font VeraMono is not available on your device."

The font is here though:

/usr/share/fonts/ttf/VeraMono.ttf

So perhaps font handling may not be optimal if such a font
can not be found? /usr/share/fonts/ttf/ is quite common on
linux. I also ran "fc-cache -f -v" prior to trying to compile
the .java file, but it seems it can not find such fonts. Omitting
the name works, so it must work internally.

[Krassnig]

Hi,

you are correct, as of version 3.0.0 there is no way to check whether a font is available on a system except for catching an exception.

Starting from version 4.0.0 the setFontName() method will be changed to accept several fonts:

CodeDraw cd = new CodeDraw();
TextFormat tf = cd.getTextFormat();
tf.setFontName("Arial", "Verdana", "JetBrains Mono");

The first font in the list which is available on executing system will be used to draw text. If none of these are available, Javas default font Font.DIALOG will be used. CodeDraws default font will be Font.DIALOG, see Physical and Logical Fonts.

Additionally, the method TextFormat.getAllAvailableFontNames() and TextFormat.isFontNameAvailable(String fontName) will be added and a method to set the font name to its default value textFormat.setFontNameToDefault().

Previously, CodeDraw set the font name to 'Arial' internally, but there was no check to see if it was actually available (the check still happened when the setFontName(String) was called from the outside). I would assume that the Tests we did on Linux just defaulted to some other font and that was why we didn't notice.

Font not found issue:

I tried checking if there is a mismatch between the fonts listed with the linux command fc-list and on first glance they seem to match with the fonts in CodeDraw/Java. I also tried installing JetBrains Mono which also worked. CodeDraw uses the GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAvailableFontFamilyNames() method to get all available font names. This is also what is recommended in Physical and Logical Fonts.

What seems to be the issue is that the method GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAvailableFontFamilyNames() doesn't return the font you added to your system. Maybe you could ellaborate on how you added the font to your system, what linux distribution you used and what the list of fonts returned from GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAvailableFontFamilyNames() is. Maybe there is another method in Java which does return your font.

Thank you for your feedback 👌

[Krassnig]

Implemented in version 4.0.0