Font Character Selection

**Sedu** · October 15th, 2017, 06:05 PM

Hello, all! I've got a pretty specific goal and I was hoping to get some advice on the best way to achieve it.

The long and the short of the question is this: How do I detect whether a given character exists in a font that I am using?

Here are the particulars. I have a program that allows users to select their own font for text display (a core element of the functionality requires this). There are situations when a user will enter text including characters that do not exist in the font. I need a way to make this default the non-displayable characters to a preselected, unicode compatible font that I already have.

The second element of this will be figuring out how to have the AWT elements know to swap out only certain characters when creating the text, and any suggestions there would be welcome as well.

Sorry that this issue isn't as straightforward as a block of code, but I'm not quite sure where the best place to start is.

Any help appreciated!

**BinaryDigit09** · October 20th, 2017, 06:52 PM

Sounds like you need font.canDisplay(char)?

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/doc.../awt/Font.html

That's the easy part. I would imagine the second part would be quite a challenge. I can't think of any way to do that except for custom drawing of all the text in paintComponent(). Draw some of the string with the user's font, switch to your custom font for a non-displayable character and draw that, then switch back to the user's font, etc. But once you commit to that, then you get to do your own word wrapping, left/center/right alignments, etc.

I might be overthinking it though, and there just might be something out there I'm not aware of that could make it more simple. But I'm at a loss.

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