Display Unicode Character in Swing Objects

Question

I am trying to display Chinese Characters using Swing GUI.
I created Unicode strings using escape character \uXXXX
I displayed \u4e00 successfully
However when I tried to display \ub8db i got a square box displayed instead.
I am using: Winnt ver 4 ,RichWin 97
private Object listData[] = {
new String("\ucfe3\ub8db"), // Two boxes displayed in list
new String("\u4e01\u4e00"), // Characters displayed correctly
new String("Third selection")
To hope to get some replies ASAP. Thanks!!!
Regards,
Patrick

Answer 1

Hi Patrick,
Yeh, fonts are rather ubiquitous when it comes to internationalization. The fact that the font.properties files still exist confuses a lot of people. In reality, Sun doesn't support them any more, and they aren't all that useful if you're actually deploying your code onto other machines.
So, to answer your questions... :D
1) Each component will have a font set on it. To start with, each component will end up with the JDK default, usually the Dialog font in Java. From memory, I think this maps to Arial on Windows systems, though I'm not sure if RichWin alters this in anyway, as I haven't used it myself.
You can check the available fonts on your machine by calling:
GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAvailableFontFamilyNames();
This returns an array of strings. You can basically create a new font from any of the names that appear in here. For instance, if one of the strings was "Arial Bold", you could create the following font:
Font myFont = new Font("Arial Bold", Font.PLAIN, 12);
2) The best way is to simply create the font you want on startup. If you can't rely on the font
you need being installed on every machine you plan to run your program on, the best solution is to either install it on startup, or carry it around with you.
Have a look at Font.createFont(), as it allows you to create a new Font object from a *.TTF file (a TrueType font). In JDK1.3, this is buggy, leaving a large temp file behind every time you run it, but I've already tried this under Merlin Beta, and it's fixed and working fine.
The reason this is handy is because the font we keep talking about on here, Arial Unicode MS, is a TrueType font. So you can carry the font around with you, and load it on startup using this call.
Arial Unicode MS is a 23Mb font, but it's capable of displaying just about any character you could imagine.
The trick from there, once you've loaded your font, is to make sure you call setFont() on just about any component you create. Menus are a cow - you've got to listen for events, as the dropdown menus don't always get the font straight away. But other than that, it's fairly simple.
3) The short answer is to call the getAvailableFontFamilyNames() call above, and look for any familiar font names. If you can't find any, you know you're not going to be able to display anything.
Windows seems to have standard fonts for the international languages. In Chinese, this is SimHei for Simplified (mainland) Chinese, and MingLiU for Traditional (Taiwanese) Chinese. Simplified covers about 30,000 Kanji, while Traditional covers around 80,000.
So for Chinese, you would look for "SimHei" and "MingLiU", plus any of the fonts capable of displaying anything, like "Arial Unicode MS". If none of these strings are in the array, you may want to carry the Arial Unicode MS installer around with you and execute it. This file is about 11Mb, and is available as a download off the Microsoft website.
4) Probably about the most useful thing I've come across is the Sun I18N tutorial on this very website. There isn't a heck of a lot out there, unfortunately. About the only other things I can recommend are http://www.unicode.org for the Unicode character codes, and http://www.njstar.com for NJStar Communicator, which you'll find useful if you're working with Chinese.
Oh, and watch this forum, of course. ;D
Hope that helps!
Martin Hughes