MIDP Programming - Java 2 Micro Edition Application Development - page 60

In addition to the current drawing color, the result of the drawString() method is influenced by the
current font. MIDP provides support for three different fonts in three different sizes and with the three
different attributes: bold, italic, and underlined.

A font is not selected directly, but the setFont() method takes a separate Font object, describing
the desired font, as a parameter. The explicit Font class provides additional information about the font,
such as its width and height in pixels, baseline position, ascent and descent, and so on. Figure 3.14
illustrates the meaning of the corresponding values. This information is important for operations such
as drawing boxes around text strings. In addition, word-wrapping algorithms rely on the actual pixel
width of character strings when rendered to the screen.

Figure 3.14. Font properties and the corresponding query methods.

A Font object is created by calling the static method createFont() of the class Font in the
lcdui package. The createFont() method takes three parameters: the font type, style, and size of
the font. Similar to the text alignment, there are predefined constants for setting the corresponding
value; these constants are listed in Table 3.9 .

Table 3.9. createFont() Property Constants
Property Constants
Size

S IZE_SMALL , SIZE_MEDIUM , SIZE_LARGE

Style

S TYLE_PLAIN , STYLE_ITALICS , STYLE_BOLD , STYLE_UNDERLINED

Face

F ACE_SYSTEM , FACE_MONOSPACE , FACE_PROPORTIONAL

The style constants can be combined—for example, STYLE_ITALICS | STYLE_BOLD will result
in a bold italics font style.

The following example shows a list of all fonts available, as far as the list fits on the screen of the
device:

import javax.microedition.lcdui.*;

class FontDemoCanvas extends Canvas {

static final int [] styles = {Font.STYLE_PLAIN,
Font.STYLE_BOLD,
Font.STYLE_ITALIC} ;
static final int [] sizes = {Font.SIZE_SMALL,
Font.SIZE_MEDIUM,
Font.SIZE_LARGE} ;
static final int [] faces = {Font.FACE_SYSTEM,
Font.FACE_MONOSPACE,
Font.FACE_PROPORTIONAL} ;
public void paint (Graphics g) {
Font font = null;