IBM Java 2 Text and Font Support

This document contains tools and information which can be downloaded for use with the IBM Java 2 font and text support. This page was last revised 12 August 2002.

  IBM Java 2 Converters


This is a table showing the Java Converters and Charsets supported by IBM Java 1.4. It also shows the aliases and the release in which the converter was added.

  fontgrid version 2: beta


This package is a zip file which consists of a beta version of fontgrid which contains a backup bitmap font containing all characters from Unicode 4.0. This allows it to be used as a Unicode reference. This version is much larger (about 10MB).

  Display font in unicode or codepages


This package is a zip file which consists of three Java applications:
fontgrid
Font and converter demo using swing
fontgridawt
Font and converter demo using AWT
convdump
Command line converter dump program

fontgrid and fontgridawt are similar except that fontgrid uses Swing controls, and fontgridawt uses legacy AWT controls. These demos display either a Unicode range or a codepage mapping. The font (including size and attributes) can be specified. Both allow printing in either Java2D or AWT.

These applications can be used as an online Unicode reference. When the mouse pointer is over a character in the grid, data about the character is shown at the bottom of the window. If you click on the character the details of the character are shown. You must have the file UnicodeData.txt in the current directory for this to work.

To display a codepage, choose view->codepage. This will change from a Unicode range to a codepage view. You can then select the codepage from the list. For double byte codepaged, the initial byte is represented by a red number. Click on this number to see the specified range. Click on the outside of the grid to return.

You can use the pageup and pagedown keys to move up and down Unicode ranges or between codepages.

Using options, you can change the drawing method used to draw the characters. This will produce different results for complex languages. Using label does the display using AWT. Be careful using this option as it has some performance problems.

To see a large number of scripts, you will need to have a Unicode font. On Windows you can use the arialuni.ttf font (available as part of Microsoft Office). The WorldType fonts available from IBM will also work.

convdump is a dump program for Java converters. Given a converter name it attempts to do all ByteToChar conversions, and all CharToByte conversions. If the converter name starts with an exclaimation point, the nio interfaces are used. These do not work before JDK 1.4.0. These are several additional options, but they are not required in most cases.

For example, to dump the codepage Cp850 do: 

    java convdump Cp850 >Cp850.out