Supported Fonts

The set of supported fonts varies between different implementations of the Java 2 platform. This page documents font support in Sun's Java 2 Software Development Kit, Standard Edition, v. 1.4 (J2SDK), and Java 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition, v. 1.4 (J2RE)

• Physical and Logical Fonts
• Support for Physical Fonts
• Support for Logical Fonts
• The Lucida Fonts

Physical and Logical Fonts

The Java 2 platform distinguishes between two kinds of fonts: physical fonts and logical fonts.

Physical fonts are the actual font libraries containing glyph data and tables to map from character sequences to glyph sequences, using a font technology such as TrueType or PostScript Type 1. All implementations of the Java 2 platform must support TrueType fonts; support for other font technologies is implementation dependent. Physical fonts may use names such as Helvetica, Palatino, HonMincho, or any number of other font names. Typically, each physical font supports only a limited set of writing systems, for example, only Latin characters or only Japanese and Basic Latin. The set of available physical fonts varies between configurations. Applications that require specific fonts can bundle them and instantiate them using the createFont method.

Logical fonts are the five font families defined by the Java platform which must be supported by any Java runtime environment: Serif, SansSerif, Monospaced, Dialog, and DialogInput. These logical fonts are not actual font libraries. Instead, the logical font names are mapped to physical fonts by the Java runtime environment. The mapping is implementation and usually locale dependent, so the look and the metrics provided by them vary. Typically, each logical font name maps to several physical fonts in order to cover a large range of characters.

Peered AWT components, such as Label and TextField, can only use logical fonts.

For a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of using physical or logical fonts, see the Internationalization FAQ document.

Support for Physical Fonts

Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment supports TrueType and PostScript Type 1 fonts.

Physical fonts need to be installed in locations known to the Java runtime environment. Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environments look in two locations: the lib/fonts directory within the J2RE itself, and the normal font location(s) defined by the host operating system. If fonts with the same name exist in both locations, the one in the lib/fonts directory is used.

Users can add physical fonts that use a supported font technology by installing them either in the lib/fonts directory within the J2RE, or by installing them in a way supported by the host operating system (dropping them into the Fonts folder on Windows, using the pkgadd command on Solaris).

Support for Logical Fonts

Logical font names are mapped to physical fonts in implementation dependent ways. Typically one logical font name maps to several physical fonts in order to cover a large range of characters. Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environments use font.properties files to define the mapping.

Adventurous users can modify the font.properties files or create new ones. For example, users may want to add additional physical fonts to a given mapping in order to extend the set of characters supported by a logical font.

The Lucida Fonts

Sun's Java 2 Software Development Kit and Java 2 Runtime Environments bundles several physical fonts of the "Lucida" design family. These fonts are also licensed for use in other implementations of the Java 2 platform. These fonts are physical fonts, but since they come with the Java 2 runtime, they don't depend on the host operating system. Using them provides the benefit of a consistent look and feel across platforms and implementations for a large set of languages.

There are three different type families: "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Sans Typewriter", and "Lucida Bright". Each family has plain, bold, italic, and bold-italic styles. Not all of these are present in all Java 2 implementations. For example, the default download bundle of Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment for Windows only contains the Lucida Sans plain font (but note that application developers can include all Lucida fonts with a J2RE that they redistribute with an application).

The following table shows which Unicode 3.0 character blocks are covered by each font family:

Unicode Block	Lucida Sans	Lucida Sans Typewriter	Lucida Bright
Basic Latin	yes	yes	yes
Latin-1 Supplement	yes	yes	yes
Latin Extended-A	yes	yes	yes
Latin Extended-B	partial	partial	partial
IPA Extensions	partial	no	no
Spacing Modifier Letter	partial	partial	partial
Combining Diacritical Marks	partial	no	partial
Greek	yes	yes	yes
Cyrillic	partial	partial	partial
Hebrew	yes	yes	no
Arabic	partial	partial	partial
Devanagari	yes	no	no
Thai	yes	yes	no
General Punctuation	partial	partial	partial
Superscripts and Subscripts	partial	partial	partial
Currency Symbols	partial	partial	partial
Letterlike Symbols	partial	partial	partial
Number Forms	partial	partial	no
Arrows	partial	partial	partial
Mathematical Operators	yes	partial	yes
Enclosed Alphanumerics	partial	no	no
Box Drawings	partial	partial	no
Block Elements	partial	partial	no
Geometric Shapes	partial	partial	partial
Miscellaneous Symbols	partial	partial	no
Dingbats	yes	no	no
Alphabetic Presentation Forms	partial	partial	no
Arabic Presentation Forms-A	partial	partial	partial
Arabic Presentation Forms-B	yes	yes	yes

Note that of the writing systems that are generally fully supported by Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environments, the Lucida fonts do not support Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, and Korean.

The fonts are installed in the Java 2 Runtime Environment's lib/fonts directory as the following files (not all of them may be present):

LucidaSansDemiBold.ttf
LucidaSansDemiOblique.ttf
LucidaSansOblique.ttf
LucidaSansRegular.ttf
LucidaTypewriterBold.ttf
LucidaTypewriterBoldOblique.ttf
LucidaTypewriterOblique.ttf
LucidaTypewriterRegular.ttf
LucidaBrightDemiBold.ttf
LucidaBrightDemiItalic.ttf
LucidaBrightItalic.ttf
LucidaBrightRegular.ttf