Are you bored with the standard Java fonts? Do you wish you could use all sorts of exciting display fonts? Do you want people to read your text in 14 point Baskerville bold instead of the ugly font that their browser supplies? Do you want to display Russian or Thai without worrying about internationalized browsers and local fonts?

All these problems are solved with my new easy-to-use Java class that lets you use your favorite bitmap font. This class, called PCFFont, lets you display any PCF (X11 portable compiled format) bitmap font, and also provides antialiased rendering.

Example uses of new fonts

• A simple banner applet produces the above banner.
• You can do some neat effects with the text once you load a font.
• You can learn Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai, IPA, Farsi, or Japanese.
• You can use this font package to display foreign text, for example in Russian, Japanese, Hebrew, Vietnamese, or Thai, without requiring the user to have the fonts installed locally.
• The PCFFont usage page describes how to install and use the PCFFont class.

Below is another demonstration program, with source. Select the font, foreground color, and background color, and type some text to be displayed.
Unfortunately, you don't have the Java language, so you can't see it work.

Obtaining fonts

• The fonts elder futhark and linear-b are ancient alphabet fonts created by Curtis Clark, Copyright 1992-1995, free for personal use.
• A.J. Palmer supplied bookworm, casual tossed, goofball, roughage, and wacko. These are distributed as "guiltware".
• George Williams supplied ambrosia, baldur, cupola. Copyright 1987-1994 George Williams.
• Astigmatic One Eye Font Foundry supplied scrawn, rocky, and kittyprint. Fonts created by Astigmatic One Eye Font Foundry Copyright 1997, All Rights Reserved.
• Acidic is from Surfacetype and is freeware.

• Yellow dog, Concrete, and Fontocide are by Berry Brooks of Fontocide.
• Granbrook, churchman, starcross, jeff-chris, and inkpad are from Graphics Arts Us.
• The Cyrillic fonts are part of the X11 distribution fonts, Copyright 1994-1995 Cronyx Ltd.
• The Kanji font is part of the X11 distribution fonts. It is donated to the public domain by H. Kagotani.
• The Thai font was created by Manop Wongsaisuwan and is in the public domain.
• The Hebrew font is part of the X11 distribution fonts. It is Copyright 1991 Joseph Friedman.
• The New Century Schoolbook font is part of the X11 distribution fonts. It is Copyright 1984-1989, 1994 Adobe Systems Incorporated and Copyright 1988, 1994 Digital Equipment Corporation, and has this permission notice.
• The Inuit font is from K. Srinivasan; see the attached file.
• The Cherokee font is from Joan Sarah Touzet; see the attached file.

Tons of interesting fonts are available in TrueType format; take a look at Yahoo. Unfortunately the PCFFont class can't interpret TrueType fonts (although someone is working on a Java TrueType interpeter!), but fortunately you can convert TrueType fonts to PCF format. To do this, you need freetype and ttf2bdf. You use ttf2bdf to convert the TrueType font to BDF and then use bdftopcf (which should exist on your Unix machine) to convert the font to PCF. This is how I got most of the fonts above.

Note: Fonts are generally subject to copyright and licensing agreements. Please follow the applicable licensing agreements.

For other ways to use bitmap fonts in Java, see Kevin Hughes's GraphicFont and Paul Haeberli's GifFont class, which is part of his WebFonts proposal.

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Copyright 1998 Ken Shirriff. Last updated 1/21/99. Java and other Java-based names are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and refer to Sun's family of Java-branded technologies. Use of this software is subject to the terms of the license agreement.