Whining about subpixel anti-aliasing again

I'm using IDEA 5.1 and currently run it with Java 6 b72. Subpixel anti-aliasing is nice... where it's visible. Running under the system look-and-feel, in this case Windows XP, standard Swing components have the nice text, but custom components, such as the editor (but there are many others), aren't anti-aliased in this way, which is a shame.

The custom look-and-feels, such as Alloy, which obviously render their own text, seem to be even less "subpixel-AA-friendly".

To add support for this, see:
http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/java/awt/Toolkit.html#getDesktopProperty(java.lang.String)
http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/java/awt/doc-files/DesktopProperties.html

Note that this is backwards-compatible, and the call won't fail under Java 1.4.2. It just won't do anything... But for those on the bleeding edge (which will eventually become everyone), it'd be very nice and stop a lot of subpixel-AA FUD in IDE comparisons.

- Chris

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4 comments

Proper rendering hints are automatically set by JDK when running on Windows or Gnome. It doesn't help, I guess IDEA forces different settings on Graphics2D.

See description of the hack which puts LCD-AA hints in the desktop properties here:
http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jsp?forum=22&thread=159503&tstart=15&trange=15

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The hack didn't work for me (I did try it, and it wrote a confirmation message to STDOUT, but didn't see any change in the text editor; the other components - standard swing components - worked anyway), which was why I optimistically posted links to the official way of doing it.

- Chris

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Have you enabled settings->appearance->use AA fonts in editor?

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That works for the editor. Now for the rest of the application..! Anyway, will stop whining, it's the weekend soon... :)

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