The Font class represents fonts, which are used to render text in a visible way. A font provides the information needed to map sequences of characters to sequences of glyphs and to render sequences of glyphs on Graphics and Component objects.

Characters and Glyphs

A character is a symbol that represents an item such as a letter, a digit, or punctuation in an abstract way. For example, 'g', LATIN SMALL LETTER G, is a character.

A glyph is a shape used to render a character or a sequence of characters. In simple writing systems, such as Latin, typically one glyph represents one character. In general, however, characters and glyphs do not have one-to-one correspondence. For example, the character 'á' LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE, can be represented by two glyphs: one for 'a' and one for '´'. On the other hand, the two-character string "fi" can be represented by a single glyph, an "fi" ligature. In complex writing systems, such as Arabic or the South and South-East Asian writing systems, the relationship between characters and glyphs can be more complicated and involve context-dependent selection of glyphs as well as glyph reordering. A font encapsulates the collection of glyphs needed to render a selected set of characters as well as the tables needed to map sequences of characters to corresponding sequences of glyphs.

Physical and Logical Fonts

The Java Platform distinguishes between two kinds of fonts: physical fonts and logical fonts.

Physical fonts are the actual font libraries containing glyph data and tables to map from character sequences to glyph sequences, using a font technology such as TrueType or PostScript Type 1. All implementations of the Java Platform must support TrueType fonts; support for other font technologies is implementation dependent. Physical fonts may use names such as Helvetica, Palatino, HonMincho, or any number of other font names. Typically, each physical font supports only a limited set of writing systems, for example, only Latin characters or only Japanese and Basic Latin. The set of available physical fonts varies between configurations. Applications that require specific fonts can bundle them and instantiate them using the createFont method.

Logical fonts are the five font families defined by the Java platform which must be supported by any Java runtime environment: Serif, SansSerif, Monospaced, Dialog, and DialogInput. These logical fonts are not actual font libraries. Instead, the logical font names are mapped to physical fonts by the Java runtime environment. The mapping is implementation and usually locale dependent, so the look and the metrics provided by them vary. Typically, each logical font name maps to several physical fonts in order to cover a large range of characters.

Peered AWT components, such as Label and TextField, can only use logical fonts.

For a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of using physical or logical fonts, see the Physical and Logical Fonts in The Java Tutorials document.

Font Faces and Names

A Font can have many faces, such as heavy, medium, oblique, gothic and regular. All of these faces have similar typographic design.

There are three different names that you can get from a Font object. The logical font name is simply the name that was used to construct the font. The font face name, or just font name for short, is the name of a particular font face, like Helvetica Bold. The family name is the name of the font family that determines the typographic design across several faces, like Helvetica.

The Font class represents an instance of a font face from a collection of font faces that are present in the system resources of the host system. As examples, Arial Bold and Courier Bold Italic are font faces. There can be several Font objects associated with a font face, each differing in size, style, transform and font features.

Glyphs may not always be rendered with the requested properties (e.g, font and style) due to platform limitations such as the absence of suitable platform fonts to implement a logical font.

The getAllFonts method of the GraphicsEnvironment class returns an array of all font faces available in the system. These font faces are returned as Font objects with a size of 1, identity transform and default font features. These base fonts can then be used to derive new Font objects with varying sizes, styles, transforms and font features via the deriveFont methods in this class.

Font and TextAttribute

Font supports most TextAttributes. This makes some operations, such as rendering underlined text, convenient since it is not necessary to explicitly construct a TextLayout object. Attributes can be set on a Font by constructing or deriving it using a Map of TextAttribute values.

The values of some TextAttributes are not serializable, and therefore attempting to serialize an instance of Font that has such values will not serialize them. This means a Font deserialized from such a stream will not compare equal to the original Font that contained the non-serializable attributes. This should very rarely pose a problem since these attributes are typically used only in special circumstances and are unlikely to be serialized.

• FOREGROUND and BACKGROUND use Paint values. The subclass Color is serializable, while GradientPaint and TexturePaint are not.
• CHAR_REPLACEMENT uses GraphicAttribute values. The subclasses ShapeGraphicAttribute and ImageGraphicAttribute are not serializable.
• INPUT_METHOD_HIGHLIGHT uses InputMethodHighlight values, which are not serializable. See java.awt.im.InputMethodHighlight.

Clients who create custom subclasses of Paint and GraphicAttribute can make them serializable and avoid this problem. Clients who use input method highlights can convert these to the platform-specific attributes for that highlight on the current platform and set them on the Font as a workaround.

The Map-based constructor and deriveFont APIs ignore the FONT attribute, and it is not retained by the Font; the static getFont method should be used if the FONT attribute might be present. See java.awt.font.TextAttribute#FONT for more information.

Several attributes will cause additional rendering overhead and potentially invoke layout. If a Font has such attributes, the hasLayoutAttributes() method will return true.