Playing nice with Gnome desktop

September 29th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

A few months ago i wrote about Mac-specific font policy in Substance look-and-feel that makes all Substance-powered Swing application pick the correct font sizes when running under Mac OS. In the past few days i’ve added a font policy for Gnome desktops (Ubuntu among the rest), following a bug report opened by one of the users.

It pretty much follows the implementation of GtkLookAndFeel in JDK 6.0, querying the gnome.Gtk/FontName and gnome.Xft/DPI desktop properties to honor both the default desktop font size and the custom DPI setting.

Here is how an application looks like when it runs under Ubuntu 7.04 with the latest 4.1dev drop of Substance:

Here is how the same application looks like under TSCu_Times font with base size 9 and 144DPI setting (the default is 96DPI):

Note that you don’t need to change anything in your application – Substance handles the font size computation on its own. In addition, it also picks up the desktop anti-aliasing settings when it runs under JDK 6.0 and later.

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2 Comments on “Playing nice with Gnome desktop”

  1. 1 i30817 said at 10:18 am on October 1st, 2007:

    Possibly this would be a nice thing for other Laf to have? I know you have a common infrastructure project with other look and feels so can this be moved there?

  2. 2 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 10:25 am on October 1st, 2007:

    Thanks for the suggestion. The project you’re talking about was refactored out of Substance in May 2006, and since then Substance is still the only LAF that is using it as far as i know. So, in the meantime, the font policy layer (that is based on Looks font policy layer) will stay in Substance codebase.