This Applet will help you write Java code. It will show you what AWT fonts are available via Java on your
machine, and what they look like in a variety of styles, sizes and colours. Click any ball to view the corresponding colour palette.
This Applet will let you generate foreground and background colours from a palette of any of 16,777,216 numbered
colours. This range of colour/color possibilities is known as the gamut. Use the
FontShower for Swing Applet to see what you can do in Swing. Use the Unicode Applet if you want to view the entire Unicode character set.
If, fontshowerawt, the above Font Shower for AWT Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) does not work…
- This Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) needs at least 32-bit (not 64-bit) Java 1.2. For best results use the latest 1.6.0_18. and a recent browser.
- Firefox 3.6 requires Java 1.6.0_10 or later.
- If you have Windows 7 64-bit and Internet Explorer 64-bit, you can use 64-bit Java.
- You should see the Applet hybrid above looking much like the screenshot. If you don’t, the following should help you get it working:
- If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, try another browser. Seriously. Microsoft has taken great pains, over and over, to screw up Java and every other multi-platform standardisation.
- If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or 8, you must allow blocked content permission for Active X to run. This also gives permission to Java to run. Click the Information bar, and then click Allow blocked content. Unfortunately, this also allows dangerous ActiveX code to run. However, you must do this in order to get access to perfectly-safe Java Applets running in a sandbox. This is part of Microsoft’s war on Java. Don’t put up with it! Use a different browser.
- Especially if this Applet hybrid has worked before, try clearing the browser cache and rebooting.
- To ensure your Java is up to date, check with Wassup. First, download it and run it as an application independent of your browser, then run it online as an Applet to add the complication of your browser.
- If the above Applet hybrid does not work, check the Java console for error messages.
- If the above Applet hybrid does not work, you might have better luck with the downloadable version.
- If you still can’t get the program working click HELP for more detail.
- If you can’t get the above Applet hybrid working after trying the advice above and from the HELP button below, have bugs to report or ideas to improve the program or its documentation, please send me an email at
.

FontShowerAwt is displaying the AWT fonts available on your machine via Java. Other people will
have different fonts installed and will see different selections available via Java on their machines. Your
browser will see a slightly different set of fonts than this Java Applet does. Java has a few extra private
fonts, and some browser fonts don’t work with Java.
Unfortunately, in AWT, only the basic logical fonts: Dialog, DialogInput, Monospaced, SansSerif, and
Serif are available for use in Labels, TextFields and TextAreas. To get other fonts shown here, you must write
a custom component based on Canvas and drawString.
The Canvas displays were done with a custom AWT Canvas-based component. This lets
you use all the fonts and all the characters in the fonts. The source code is available.
The alternate vanilla AWT TextArea display is based on a native OS peer (as are as
Label and TextField). It can only display the 5 basic
logical fonts and then only some of the characters in those fonts. You have no control in Java over whether TextAreas are anti-aliased. They are rendered
by the OS, not Java, and hence are controlled by whether font smoothing is turned on in the Control Panel.
You may not notice any difference with font-smoothing anti-aliasing. Look for the anti-alias smoothing
especially in very large font sizes in capital W in the fonts with thin spidery diagonals, e.g. Bodoni, Book
Antiqua, Garamond, Serif and Zapf Calligraphic.
Some of the fonts may just show empty squares. These are older 8-bit fonts that don’t support 16-bit
Unicode used by Java. Don’t necessarily delete them ( by clicking
Control Panel ⇒ fonts ⇒ delete) since word processing documents, or the DOS
box, may still be using them. on the other hand, pruning out ugly fonts you never use will speed up your
machine.
| details about the current
version. |
download source and executable to
run this Applet on your own machine as a stand-alone application. |