I have tended to use the original 1.1 recommendations with fonts of
specifying, generic families (serif, sanserif, monospaced etc) for
example:
myFont = new Font("sanserif", Font.PLAIN,10);
setFont(myFont);
g.drawString("wibble", 5, 5);
but currently I need to display the Greek phi and psi characters. I
therefore used the names of the Symbol font:
myFont = new Font("Symbol", Font.PLAIN,10); etc
which works ok going back to Mac OS 9, but not on Mac OS X (where I
was working), where it reverts to some default sans font, although
specifying the names of other fonts, eg 'Times' works ok.
I did a number of tests, checking for available fonts using the
appropriate java code on the command line lists a set of fonts
including Symbol. Symbol is also available to desktop apps like
Word, Appleworks etc. However on viewing fonts with Apple's
Keyboard Viewer, Symbol displays in a Roman face rather than in
Greek characters. This happens on two machines, both running 10.4.7
PPC, one of which is a relatively new PowerBook G4 onto which I
have not done any font installs.
Interestingly the tutorial font applet on Sun's website behaves
similarly to Keyboard Viewer - ie the font is listed but displays
in Roman face.
I've copied model code until I'm blue in the face, tried it in
Graphics 2D, all to no avail. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
And while I'm on the subject, how would I specify a special
character like an en-dash (alt-hyphen) to get a proper minus sign?
David
