Font Editor

Pure Java font rendering

We are building a pure Java™ font-rendering technology - targetted at J2ME, Personal Java and Java 1.1 environments.

This supports anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, background blending, variable-strength emboldening, italicising and condensing - and will allow access to a range of TrueType™ fonts.

Demonstrations

While our product is not yet complete, we are making available some demonstration applets - to give an indication of the current state of play:

  • Font editor demonstration

    The font editor displays an array of glyphs, and allows glyph outlines to be modified by dragging control points around.

    Run applet(Java applet)(Native JVM)(120K)
    Run applet(Java applet)(Plugin JVM)(120K)
    WebStart *(Java application)(WebStart)(120K)
    Download(Jar file)(Jar)(120K)

  • Kerning demonstration

    This displays the kerning of some user-editable text in a variety of fonts, weights, aspect-ratios and styles.

    Run applet(Java applet)(Native JVM)(87K)
    Run applet(Java applet)(Plugin JVM)(87K)
    WebStart *(Java application)(WebStart)(87K)
    Download(Jar file)(Jar)(87K)

  • Scrolling document demonstration

    This shows a text document being scrolled within a view port.

    More details of this demonstration can be found here.

Projects

There are three main projects associated with our font renderer:

Goals

We are hoping to be able to render high quality displays at small point sizes from within a small footprint.

By sticking to 100% Java we expect to attain maximal portability. We plan to allow developers to target the full range of Java platforms using the same font-rendering code.

We will be avoiding using floating point code in the renderer - to accomodate J2ME profiles which lack floating point support, and to get maximum speed on StrongARM processors - which typically lack hardware floating point units.

Our renderer allows for automated generation of fully- hinted bold, italic and condensed glyphs - allowing factors such as weight, angle and aspect ratio to be controlled for every font.

Open source

This is an open source project.

The code is not copyrighted, but is instead placed into the public domain.

This is spelled out in more detail here.

The motivation behind this sort of license is described here.

Details

There are some more details relating to the operation of the font renderer here.

Contributions

If you'd like to join in with development - or have support enquiries - you should get in touch with Tim - e.g. here.

Download source code

A snapshot of the project's source code is available here.

Links

  • Font editor links

    • Acknowledgements

    TrueType is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.
    Java is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems.
    Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer are also a registered trademarks.

    Tim Tyler | Contact | http://fonteditor.org/