Are proportional fonts supported by IntelliJ IDEA
Yesterday I tried to investigate using a proportional (i.e. non-monospaced) font for code editors and thus set IntelliJ IDEA to use Lucida Grande. While I seems to work pretty well, I found a few annoying problems. E.g. in some wrapped lines the cursor is not displayed in the correct position. No I don't know whether I should file bug reprots for those problems or just give up on the excercise.
Is using proportional fonts in IntelliJ IDEA's editors a supported configuration or just someting I'm not prevented from doing on my own risk?
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Hi Michael, you're probably using JRE 1.7.* for IntelliJ IDEA and there is a well-known issue with font-metrics for 1.7 Unfortunatelly, there is no an easy way to fix it because it involves JRE modification in native code. However, Oracle has fixed this issue in 1.8 Could you please try it out? https://jdk8.java.net/download.html
Here is the instruction How to setup Idea to run under 1.8 https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/entries/23455956-Selecting-the-JDK-version-the-IDE-will-run-under
Using JDK 1.8 does not solve the problem, but font rendering is much worse. Subpixel-hinting is not enabled and text looks much fainter (see the attached two screen shots), which makes it harder to read. From this answer on Stack Overflow [0], it should be possible to enable this using the API.
[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/19426444/402281
Thanks
Michael
Attachment(s):
1.8.png
1.6.png
I just noticed that I missed that you were taking about JDK 1.7. I'm running IntelliJ IDEA using Apple's JDK 1.6. The problems I noticed happen with Apple's JDK 1.6 as well as Oracle's current pre-release of JDK 1.8.
Could you please go to About dialog, press Meta+C and paste here?
With "1.6*" for JVMVersion:
IntelliJ IDEA 13.0.2
Build #IU-133.696, built on January 24, 2014
JRE : 1.6.0_65-b14-462-11M4609 x86_64
VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM by Apple Inc.
With "1.8*" for JVMVersion:
IntelliJ IDEA 13.0.2
Build #IU-133.696, built on January 24, 2014
JRE : 1.8.0-b129 x86_64
VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM by Oracle Corporation