Monospaced Fonts

Question

Hi
I have read: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/awt/Font.html
Logical fonts are the five font families defined by the Java platform which must be supported by any Java runtime environment: Serif, SansSerif, Monospaced, Dialog, and DialogInput. These logical fonts are not actual font libraries. Instead, the logical font names are mapped to physical fonts by the Java runtime environment. The mapping is implementation and usually locale dependent, so the look and the metrics provided by them vary. Typically, each logical font name maps to several physical fonts in order to cover a large range of characters.
I can obtain all the fonts that are in a particular system, but now need to go though them to see if they are Monospaced.
This is what I have done so far:
String[] allFonts = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAvailableFontFamilyNames();
ArrayList<String> monoFonts = new ArrayList();
for(int i=0;i<allFonts.length; i++)
  if (f.getFamily().toString().equals("Monospaced"))
    monoFonts.add(allFonts);
Thanks!
Sam                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Answer 1

ArrayList<String> monoFonts = new ArrayList();You need to specify <String> when you use new.
if (f.getFamily().toString()getFamilty() returns a String, so the toString() isn't needed. More of a problem is that you haven't declared or initialised f. I guess it's a Font. Initialise it using the 3 argument Font constructor.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/Font.html#Font(java.lang.String, int, int)
.equals("Monospaced")There's a problem here. This will be true when you have a font family whose name is "Monospaced", not a family whose fonts are monospaced. For instance my computer has a family "Courier 10 Pitch" which is monospaced and a bunch of others with "Mono" in their names. The Font class singles out one of these - identified as Font.MONOSPACED - but they are all monospaced.
I don't know if there is any easy way of determining whether a font is monospaced. One way might be to obtain an array of all the available fonts with the GraphicsEnvironment method getAllFonts() and then check the widths of various characters to see if they are equal. The FontMetrics method getWidths() returns the first 256 such widths.
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/GraphicsEnvironment.html#getAllFonts()
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/FontMetrics.html#getWidths()