AntiAliasing and Java

Whenever I ran a Swing Java application on my Fedora, I really hated its ugly appearance of fonts and I was always wondering why Java doesn’t support font anti aliasing in Linux. But I’ve never searched for it in the web, since I thought that if such support exists, it should be enabled already! Today, I’ve decided to look for it, and I found the answer very quickly!! Java already supports font anti-aliasing in Linux, it is simply disabled by default (at least in OpenJDK, in Fedora!). And the solution is simple, just set the desired option in the _JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable. e.g.:

export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on"

and then run your Java application. The GUI will be much more desirable then! I’d suggest adding this option globally. You can simply put the above line in your ~/.bashrc (if you are using bash!), or put it in a file in the /etc/profile.d/ directory. For example, this is the contents of my /etc/profile.d/tune.sh:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on"

(The first option is not related to the current discussion, but I think it is desirable for most users. With this option, bash will merge same sequential history contents into one history item)

I also like to talk about an interesting application but I keep it for a separate post! 😛

Have fun!

Update: I think it is fair to mention the original link which helped me: Java Swing anti-aliasing. Also, fortunately there is already an update for openjdk package in fedora updates-testing repository which has anti-aliasing enabled by default (at least for Swing apps. You might still need to use the above option for Awt applications).

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