openjdk6-b17 Pre Release 2

[Stephen McKay]

On Thursday, 5th November 2009, Brian Gardner wrote:

>I don't seem to be having any issues Stephen mentioned.  It appears  
>that sun jdks use Lucida Fonts by default, but I believe these are  
>licensed to sun, and that the DejuVu fonts are the standard  
>alternative.  Anybody else having similar issues to Stephen.  Stephen  
>are you running i386 or amd64?

I'm running 7.2-p3 on i386.  I guess everyone else has graduated to
grownup machines by now. :-)  But I don't think this is an issue.

I am however running an ancient Font2DTest (from 2002).  I don't know
quite how I came to have it, but it was first to hand.  The version
installed in /usr/local/openjdk6/demo/jfc (and the other JDKs) is much
more recent.

The one I've been using is the same one available here:
http://www.codase.com/search/download?file=L2dlbnRvbzIvdmFyL3RtcC9yZXBvcy9jb2Rhc2UuamF2YS9zaW1wbGUvRm9udDJEVGVzdC5qYXZh

This old version works the same in diablo, native and linux jdk 1.6.0
but is displayed badly in openjdk6.  When run under openjdk6, it must
be resized a little before everything at the top is displayed.  Whatever
out-of-date methods it is using to display stuff should still work
today, right?

Moving on to the modern Font2DTest, it behaves more sensibly under
openjdk6-b17-pr2 (the different font used is dejavu replacing the
normal default font).  However, there are still rendering issues.

First up, all bar openjdk6 can do LCD antialiasing.  In openjdk6 it's
just black and white antialiasing.

Looking again at Utopia (just because I've looked at it a few times),
the rendering is sufficiently different to the other JDKs that the E
and F look damaged.

On closer inspection, it's simply doing poor antialiasing on smaller
font sizes (under, say, 16 point).  Go small enough and every letter
seems poor.  When using large point sizes (eg 24) they differ in detail,
but look good in openjdk6 and the other JDKs.  There's some super-magic
hinting being ignored in openjdk6 then?

So, summing up, I'm using an old Font2DTest (which may have bugs or
may be exposing a genuine bug in openjdk6), some fonts (eg Utopia)
are not being rendered as well as expected, and antialiasing is not
as featureful as expected.

Stephen.