After taking a deep dive into the intricacies of aligning text components, comboboxes, spinners and buttons in the latest 6.0dev drops of Substance look-and-feel, it’s time to talk about supporting different font settings.

As with precise micro-design, Karsten has pioneered the Swing work on matching the desktop font settings in his JGoodies Looks collection of look-and-feels. Along with the native font rasterizer (at least on Windows Vista and its Segoe UI 12 font), this is by far the most important part in creating an application that is visually consistent with the user desktop. Personally, i think that one of the biggest mistakes in Java 6 was staying with Tahoma 11 as the default font for the native Windows look-and-feel, followed closely by an equally baffling font choice in Nimbus.

After the JGoodies font policy layer has been adopted in Substance, it was extended to provide font policies for Mac, KDE and Gnome desktops. When you run a Substance-powered application under one of these (or Windows), it will query the desktop font settings, and adopt them for all the controls and title panes. While this may cause a form designed for Windows XP (Tahoma 11) to have controls overflowing the form bounds on Gnome (DejaVu Sans 13), it is a small price to pay – in my personal view.

Given the wide choice of fonts that Substance must support, the micro-design layer in Substance needs cannot use hard-coded pixel values for control insets, margins, gaps and strokes. This functionality has been present for quite some time, and now is extended to support the new alignment requirements.

Here is a screenshot of the relevant controls under the different Tahoma font sizes:

and the same controls with guider lines showing the alignment of perceived vertical bounds and text baselines:

If you’re interested to see what Substance 6.0dev can bring to your application, take it for a spin. You can also click the button below to launch a WebStart demo – switch to the “Alignment” tab and see the control alignment in action: