hello
uh, I prob come off in my posts as mildly retarded. Anyways, I will
try to wrap this up since I already taken too much of your time and
patience.
1)
Most home computer systems also have a distinct look and feel to
the pop-up dialog boxes and other system elements (e.g., window
titles). You can use these as well as Sun as kindly defined
the system standard font for dialog boxes as "Dialog" and
"DialogInput" logical font names, so you can make your dialogs
appear native.
So Java on specific platform somehow knows which font this platform
uses for dialog boxes and maps that font to Dialog ( just one I
assume, thus no stitching of fonts together? ) ?
However all home computers ship with a set of fonts standard for
that platform. So for every platform Sun supports, they picked 3
available fonts (these are the actual fonts installed and are
called "physical") and gave them names you can use in your
program.
Say some OS has three physical fonts S, SS, M which Java by default
maps onto: S onto Serif, SS onto Sans-Serif, and M onto Mono-spaced
a)
If Java by default maps only 3 physical fonts to 3 logical fonts
( thus by default each logical font is mapped onto only one physical
font ), then that would suggest that by default no font stitching
happens?
b)
* Does Java have some kind of file or something that tells it names of
physical fonts ( not all, but some ) that should be mapped to, say
monospaced logical font ( based on how they visually represent
characters )?
* Or does Java by default only know to which logical fonts to map
default physical fonts S, SS and M?
BTW -I'm not implying that Java doesn't know of existence of other
physical fonts on the system, but instead that Java doesn't know to
which logical fonts to map those other physical fonts --> meaning we
must somehow tell Java which physical font to map to which logical
font - thus we must classify physical fonts by ourselves?!
2)
The stitching together of fonts can be avoided if there is a
decent Unicode supporting font. It would be done primarily to
pull in the Chinese, Arabic etc whose fonts don't look anything
like the Latin ones.
Does stitching of several physical fonts to one logical font happen by
default or is by default only one physical font mapped to particular
logical font?
3)
So Java can map its logical font onto A?
But as some other poster pointed out, Java uses just Unicode and
ignores the rest?!
Meaning if physical font doesn't support Unicode then Java won't map
that font onto a logical font ( as always, I prob misunderstood the
chap ):
Say we have a font that is able to display all ascii characters.
We also have two different 7 bit encodings EN_1 and EN_2. Both
are able to display all ascii characters. But they have
different code points for individual characters ( for example in
EN_1 code point for character A may be 65, while in EN_2
codepoint for A may be 100 ).
Java just uses the Unicode encoding and ignores the rest.
I should mention that I haven't yet started leaning about
applets, AWT or Swing or anything related to GUI, so for that
reason I can't yet check these things out via examples
Maybe you should. Playing around with your own code and reading
the documentation is the fastest way to learn.
I will, but I should first learn about collections and events
( I would already, but due to little free time... )
thank you