Swing Hacks

Anti-Aliased Text with a Custom Look and Feel #55

Chapter 7, Text

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285

HACK

that

SwingUtilities2

is an undocumented and hidden class for which no

support will ever be provided. This means that it can be changed without

notice. Using it might break your applications in a future release of Java.

—Romain Guy

H A C K

#55

Anti-Aliased Text with a Custom

Look and Feel Hack #55

Another way to get smooth text is to use a custom Look and Feel to avoid the

fragile Java 5.0 APIs.

When the Java 5.0 anti-aliasing trick [Hack #54] was first discovered, some dis-

cussions arose on the Web. Many people strongly disagree with using it

because it can be broken at any time by Sun Microsystems. Should we be

deprived of anti-aliased text because of such a silly problem? Frédéric Lav-

igne, author of the famous Skin L&F and webmaster of www.javootoo.com,

a great repository of Look and Feels for Swing, didn’t think so and found an

elegant and clever way to get the same result.

The Wrap Look and Feel

His idea is to use a custom Look and Feel whose sole purpose is to enable

anti-aliasing hints on the

Graphics instances used to draw the UI. He imple-

mented his idea in the Wrap Look and Feel, which can be downloaded at

wraplf.l2fprod.com. Another Look and Feel, SmoothMetal, enables anti-

aliasing in your application. Yet, you are stuck with Metal Look and Feel

when using it. Wrap Look and Feel acts as a decorator for the current Look

and Feel. Thus, you can choose any Look and Feel you want and wrap it

with Wrap Look and Feel to enable anti-aliasing. Doing so requires a single

line of code:

import com.l2fprod.common.swing.plaf.wrap.Wrapper;

Wrapper.wrap( );

Figure 7-21. Anti-aliased text without J2SE 5.0 swing.aatext property

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Chapter 7, Text

#55 Anti-Aliased Text with a Custom Look and Feel

HACK

No matter which Swing Look and Feel you set, the wrap( ) method will han-

dle it properly. One line of code is good, but not good enough. We’d be bet-

ter off with no line of code at all. Frédéric feels the same way and provides

the excellent

Wrapit

class you can use to install the Wrap Look and Feel at

runtime:

java -classpath wraplf.jar;. Wrapit WebHunter

The Wrapit class contains a main( ) entry point that will install the Wrap

Look and Feel and then call the

main( ) entry point of the class passed as the

first argument on the command line. This Look and Feel is a powerful tool

you can use to enhance the appearance of any Java application, whether you

have the source code or not.

—Romain Guy