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Re: Font rendering problems on Mac OS X

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Re: Font rendering problems on Mac OS X

Posted by jcrippen at 2010-08-04 01:46

I think I figured out the basic problem. A post on Tor Norbye’s blog explains a similar problem with NetBeans. The solution is adding -Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true to tell Java to use the Quartz renderer, which apparently has been disabled in Mac OS X 10.6 due to complaints about differences between appearance of Java apps on the Mac versus on other operating systems. I don’t think Elan users care too much about that. The solution for Elan is apparently:

Make sure Elan is not running.
Right click (or Ctrl+click) on the “ELAN 3.9.0.app” file.
Select “Show Package Contents”.
In the new window, open the “Contents” folder
Open the file “Info.plist” in your favorite text editor, or use the Property List Editor if you have the Apple developer tools (e.g. XCode) installed.
In the section called “VMOptions”, beneath the line containing -Djava.library.path=lib/cocoa_qt/1.4:extensions:$java.library.path add the following:
- -Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true
Start Elan and if it breaks you get to keep both pieces.

It should “just work”. Fonts will be rendered on the screen in a somewhat heavier weight, in my experience. But more importantly, they will always be antialiased and will appear as expected. This does not solve the problem with diacritic placement below descenders like “g̱”. That is presumably a text rendering bug which is probably in either the Java implementation or perhaps deeper in Mac OS X. It probably has to do with the different renderers used for Cocoa versus non-Cocoa apps.

Re: Re: Font rendering problems on Mac OS X

Posted by hasloe at 2010-08-04 11:35

Thanks for this information.
I think you're right with respect to the rendering problems of the diacritic(s); this is part of the Java implementation. I don't have the impression that the situation on Windows is much better.

-Han