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.