Develop Reference

How to change font for JMeter? (upper i same as lower L now)

I've done web search and found only links on how to change size of the font:
How to change font size for JMeter?
I'm on MacOS JMeter 5.1 and font inside controls shows upper i same as lower L. As I've started to read answer to size issue, I came to know what HiDPI and swing for java cross-platform is.
Uncommenting jsyntaxtextarea.font.size=24 in jmeter.properties have not resulted in any visible effect, using Zoom does change size of font, but i-L issue persists at larger scales.
What are my options?
download source of JMeter, rebuild. - complex for me, at first glance least desirable. Where font name is set in source?
try to use swing functionality. Not sure it is doable w/out rebuild of JMeter. As for swing I've only read What font in Swing looks the same in all OS? now and answer to font size:
Now for fonts, you can use Swing mechanism. To do that, add to
jmeter.sh or jmeter.bat the JVM System property:
-Dswing.plaf.metal.controlFont=Dialog-20
And ensure you use the Cross Platform LAF .
But "interestingly" with Cross Platform LAF copy-paste does not work on my Mac. Command-C works on some LAF, but does not on others (including Cross Platform). "upper i same as lower L" issue is visible on all LAFs.
Try MacOS font substitution. Not sure again if it is doable. quick web search for macos font substitution did not find that specifically, some default font changes etc. What font JMeter uses?
ADDED:
Below is what happened after script run from the asnwer, some parts became not fit to space, some too small.

If copy paste shortcuts don't work on Mac you should raise this issue via JMeter Bugzilla
You can change JMeter font to whatever you like by adding the next lines to system.properties file (lives in "bin" folder of your JMeter installation)
swing.aatext=true
swing.plaf.metal.controlFont=Comic Sans MS
swing.plaf.metal.userFont=Comic Sans MS
JMeter restart will be required to pick the properties up
As the last resort you can always go for Groovy scripting and change the font directly in the runtime like:
import javax.swing.*
import java.awt.Font
def keys = UIManager.getDefaults().keys()
keys.each { key ->
def value = UIManager.get(key)
if (value instanceof javax.swing.plaf.FontUIResource) {
UIManager.put(key, new javax.swing.plaf.FontUIResource("Comic Sans MS", Font.ITALIC, 24))
}
}
as the result you will get the best JMeter UX ever:

Apache POI doesn't quite give enough space when autosizing

I am building an Excel file with Apache POI. After I add all of the content I autosize the columns using sheet.autoSizeColumn(i).
Sometimes it doesn't quite give enough space. I have tried Verdana and Calibri-Regular (had to switch to Calibri-Regular from Calibri because the autosize was going completely crazy all of a sudden on our Windows 7 boxes but worked fine on our Linux boxes, which is a mystery to me). Is there something I can do to fix this? Or is there a way to add a little padding after autosizing?
Edit:
On my Windows dev box I tried setting the font to Verdana with font.setFontName("Verdana"). All of the content definitely changes to Verdana and the sizing on the columns is perfect. On the Linux production box I used the bit of Java code that Gagravarr referenced in the below comments to print out a list of the fonts that Java sees. I tried Monospaced but the spacing was identical to the above screenshot. I then tried Dingbats and the content was still readable (which it shouldn't have been) while the spacing was really off (see screenshot below).

Also openjdk and Oracle JDK do not use the same font engine (SUN∕Oracle kept its legacy engine for fear any change would break badly coded apps). It's quite possible openjdk will work better on linux for font stuff, since it reuses the same font libraries as the rest of the system, instead of reinventing a square wheel.
Fonts are a legal nightmare; Linux fonts licensing is usually liberal enough you can copy, modify and deploy them anywhere but the reverse is not true (Microsoft was very careful to create vendor lock-in for anyone foolish enough to build apps depending on Windows fonts)

I am not sure whether this will resolve your problem or not, but if you have asked about "is there a way to add a little padding after autosizing?".... yes you can do it by following way.
testSheet.autoSizeColumn(ColIndex);
testSheet.setColumnWidth(ColIndex ,testSheet.getColumnWidth(ColIndex)+PaddingWidth);

JTable won't display Unicode correctly when the application is executed from the command line or a jar file. It works fine in eclipse, though

I'm writing an application that reads a text file containing a list of vocabulary words in both English and Chinese. These are then displayed in a JTable. When I run or debug the app in Eclipse, everything displays fine. I can see and read the characters and the English. However, when I execute the app from the command line or from an executable jar, it's all wrong. The characters show up as either squares or as gibberish.
I also have a text box that when I type Chinese into it, it displays correctly.
My first thought was that it was a font problem. I was using a font installed on my system. Since I can't guarantee that the person using this app will have that font, I moved it to a resource folder and load the font from a file. The font appears as though it's been loaded so I'm convinced it's not a font issue.
I found another question that suggested using -Dfile.encoding=utf-8. I've tried this and it did not work.
Would the brilliant folks at Stack Overflow have any advice on how to make this work?

I'm writing this on a non-chinese version of Windows.
Well then you won't ever be able to get a Java program to produce Chinese command-line output.
Java, like almost all languages, uses the C standard library which has byte-based IO. The Windows command prompt interprets byte-based IO using the locale-specific default code page. That's never a UTF, so Unicode characters outside of the current locale's default code page just won't work.
(In theory you should be able to get it to work by changing your console fonts and using chcp 65001 (UTF-8) together with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8, but in practice it doesn't work reliably due to bugs in the C runtime. Unicode on the command prompt is a long-standing sore point.)

English characters don't show up when entering text with Indic input method in Swing

I'm working on an application that accepts text in English and performs transliteration with a custom 3rd party API into an Indic language (one of several that are supported). The application is targeted at Windows XP/7 and Ubuntu.
We use a custom input method that loads the required Indic font, and uses it render text. Also, the user can correct the transliterated text by typing in English and pressing space (similar to how Google Transliterate works).
The problem is that with certain Indic fonts, typing in English shows up empty box characters (even though the actual characters typed are detected and transliterated accordingly).
I have used the ttf-indic-fonts-0.5.0 font pack that comes with Ubuntu, and was able to substitute some of them. For the others, if I copy the corresponding font from Windows (I'm developing this on Windows 7) then all problems are solved.
However, we cannot redistribute Windows fonts with our application and want an open alternative.
Other than trying to find a substitute font, is there anything else that we're doing wrong, or need to check, to make sure that English characters can be typed in a JTextField when an Indic font is being used?
As an example - from the Ubuntu package mentioned above, the lohit_pa.ttf font for Punjabi has this problem. If I copy the default Windows font for Punjabi (raavi.ttf) then it works fine.

I found a solution to the problem. I installed the fonts on Windows (open the font, click install) and browsed the contents using Character Map. These fonts only have glyphs for the language in question, not English.
I used FontForge to merge the 2 fonts. (Fontforge's author doesn't provide binaries anymore - but if you have access to Ubuntu you can install it from the repository. No such luck if you only have Windows).
After this, I'm able to type in English again.

Does Java work with PCF fonts?

I am trying to make IBM jre to use PCF fonts from default X11 installation on my linux box. In particular adobe-helvetica font. I have toyed to modify fontconfig.properties in jre/lib folder but no matter what I do Java seams to use some other fonts. I guess there is some algorithm how java VM tries to link java logical fonts to actual physical fonts in the system even in case when font specified in config could not be used. On Windows it is pretty straight forward, but on Linux I was unable to make it work with anything except TrueType fonts.
Anybody have experience with configuring fonts on IBM jre on Linux?

I've spent all morning learning about Java fonts. There's a lot of limitations, some of which are removed in Java 1.6. I don't have any answers, but here is some information I have that might be helpful.
Java distinguishes internally between system fonts and created fonts. (News flash to Sun: it'd be nice to make that clear through subclassing!) The system fonts seem to be fonts installed in the JRE possibly plus some of the fonts installed on your system. But apparently not all of the fonts installed on your system; I, too, have adobe-helvetica on my Linux system but it doesn't seem to be accessible from Java under any name I can think of.
Meanwhile, you can create fonts from a font file with the Font.createFont() method. You have to specify the font file type. The only constants I found to specify these types in the Font class are TRUETYPE_FONT and TYPE1_FONT. So it looks like if PCF fonts are available, it isn't made explicit through providing a constant to specify them. Maybe somebody else knows more. I did see some information online about using bitmap fonts in Java ME, so it must somehow be possible to use other types of fonts.
Once you have a created font, you can add it to the JVM's concept of available fonts with the GraphicsEnvironment.registerFont() call, but that is only available on Java 1.6 and later.

The PCFFont package seems to provide the ability to use PCF fonts from Java. Unfortunately I think it does so with a custom PCFFont class which does not extend the java.awt.Font class, so I would say its usefulness is probably limited. However, it might give some pointers to implementation details for writing a custom subclass of Font which can handle PCF fonts. Finding the source code isn't immediately obvious; code for that exact class is here.
I would say the author seems a little confused, because he talks about converting TrueType fonts to PCF so you can use them with his library, and Java already supports TrueType fonts natively. But he appears to be an engineer from Sun, so maybe he knew more than I think; also, this could just be very out of date (was there ever a time when Java didn't support TrueType?).