Linked by Andy Roberts on Thu 16th Jun 2005 19:50 UTC
I've been fortunate enough recently to be in contact with Steve Northover. Despite him being very busy with SWT and the forthcoming release of Eclipse, I've managed to grab some of his time to answer some of my questions. To clarify from the outset, the views expressed by Steve are his own and not those of his employer.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
"I don't get why someone always has to complain about fonts in Swing apps. They look just like fonts everywhere else. I'm using jEdit on Debian Sarge with ... ok, I hate to admit it, but I'm using Sun's 1.4.2... Anyhow, jEdit is written in Swing and the fonts look perfect. Exactly like fonts in, say, Firefox.
OK "
John fire up Jedit and reset the look and feel to GTK+ then look at the system fonts on the menus then compare to Firefox. The Java fonts suck compared to the Native fonts on Firefox. Now fire up an SWT application like Eclipse, Azureus or RSSOwl and look at the system fonts there and the look the same as on Firefox.
SWT gives genuine native GTK2 GUI for Linux apps where Swing sucks and the widgets don't work quite right either. Set your screen resolution to 600x800 and fire up Limewire with the Limewire look and feel - now set the look and feel to GTK+ and the widgets are all out of place and virtually unusable.
However Swing apps using the Windows look and feel on Windows XP do appear pretty much native and the fonts are fine. If you want your app to look native on Linux then SWT is the way to go.