How do you enable anti aliasing in arbitrary Java apps?

Many Java Apps don't use anti-aliased fonts by default, despite the capability of Swing to provide them. How can you coerce an arbitrary java application to use AA fonts? (both for applications I'm running, and applications I'm developing)

If you have access to the source, you can do this in the main method:

  // enable anti-aliased text:
  System.setProperty("awt.useSystemAAFontSettings","on");

or, (and if you do not have access to the source, or if this is easier) you can simply pass the system properties above into the jvm by adding these options to the command line:

-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on

Swing controls in the latest versions of Java 6 / 7 should automatically abide by system-wide preferences. (If you're using the Windows L&F on a Windows OS then text should render using ClearType if you have that setting enabled system-wide.) So perhaps one solution could simply be: enable the native Look and Feel?

In applications you're developing, if you render your own text directly, you also need to do something like this (at some point before calling Graphics.drawText or friends):

if (desktopHints == null) { 
    Toolkit tk = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(); 
    desktopHints = (Map) (tk.getDesktopProperty("awt.font.desktophints")); 
}
if (desktopHints != null) { 
    g2d.addRenderingHints(desktopHints); 
} 

Reference: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2007/01/font_hints_for.html

For the record, I have found out that in my windows 7 machine,

• If I don't use this in my code, I get the nice ClearType subpixel rendering.
• But if I use this, I get the classical black-and-white antialiasing which is much uglier.

So this code should be used carefully. I guess it will stop being needed at all when all Linux users have updated to the versions of OpenJDK that handle aliasing well by default.