Non-standard fonts in JOptionPane

Question

I have looked extensively through this forum, and no one has answered this specific question, even though it has been asked several different ways. Maybe someone has an answer now.
I am writing a client app using Java 1.4.2_02 that needs to display many languages. I have all of the European languages displaying correctly in JFileChooser and JOptionPane. I even have the Asian languages displaying correctly in JFileChooser. What I can't do is display the Asian languages (and probably any non-standard font) in JOptionPane correctly - all I see are boxes in place of the characters. Here is the relevant code of what I have tried so far:
        Locale.setDefault(Locale.JAPAN);
        int option = JOptionPane.YES_NO_OPTION;
        String [] buttonText = null;
        switch(option) {
            case JOptionPane.YES_NO_OPTION:
                buttonText = new String[2];
                buttonText[0] = UIManager.getString("OptionPane.yesButtonText");
                buttonText[1] = UIManager.getString("OptionPane.noButtonText");
                break;
            // other cases...
        JOptionPane jop = new JOptionPane("Do you wish to display Japanese fonts?",
                                          JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE,
                                          option,
                                          null,
                                          buttonText);
        // Have tried many fonts - MS Gothic seems to be the one that should work, though.
        // BOLD seems to slightly work - I see a (Y) or a (N) after the strange characters.
        jop.setFont(new Font("MS Gothic", Font.BOLD, jop.getFont().getSize())); 
        JDialog jopDialog = jop.createDialog(null, "Dialog Title");
        jopDialog.show();Even though most of the above code is from a post by one of the authors of "Java Internationalization", this doesn't work. Has anyone solved this problem?

Answer 1

To solve this problem, you have to tell the UIManager to set the font everywhere you need the new font. Unforunately, there is no one method call to do this. So here is the short version:
        localizedFont = new Font("MingLiU", Font.PLAIN, 12);  // or whatever font you need
        UIManager.put("ToolTip.font", localizedFont);
        UIManager.put("OptionPane.font", localizedFont);
        UIManager.put("Button.font", localizedFont);
        // etc...    Another thread (I forget where) gave code to extract all of the properties of UIManager - find that thread to get all the properties.