Swing Hacks

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Chapter 8, Rendering

#61 Load New Fonts at Runtime

HACK

Mac OS X’s font suitcases—a holdover from the Classic Mac

OS—aren’t supported. Your fonts need to be in .ttf files.

FontLoadingDemo, shown in Example 8-8, offers a straightforward applica-

tion of this font-loading technique. It takes the path to a .ttf file as its

command-line argument, creates an

InputStream, and creates a Font. It then

derives a plain, 32-point instance of the font, and uses that to put a sample

JLabel in a JFrame.

Testing Font Loading

All you need to run this demo is a .ttf file of a TrueType font, preferably one

not already installed on your system so you’ll know that the demo works.

There are many free and shareware fonts on the Web; I found the Marriage

Example 8-8. Loading fonts at runtime

public class FontLoadingDemo {

public static void main (String[] args) {

try {

// get font from path in args[0]

if (args.length < 1) {

System.out.println (

"usage: FontLoadingDemo path-to-ttf");

return;

}

File f = new File (args[0]);

FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream (f);

Font dynamicFont =

Font.createFont (Font.TRUETYPE_FONT, in);

Font dynamicFont32Pt =

dynamicFont.deriveFont (32f);

// draw something with it

JLabel testLabel =

new JLabel ("Dynamically loaded font \"" +

dynamicFont.getName( ) + "\"");

testLabel.setFont (dynamicFont32Pt);

JFrame frame = new JFrame ("Font Loading Demo");

frame.getContentPane( ).add (testLabel);

frame.pack( );

frame.setVisible(true);

} catch (Exception e) {

e.printStackTrace( );

}

}

}