Testing whether a Font is monospaced in Java

Question

Hi there,

I'm trying list all of the monospaced fonts available on a user's machine. I can get all of the font families in Swing via:

String[] fonts = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment()
                                    .getAvailableFontFamilyNames();

Is there a way to figure out which of these are monospaced?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Compare the drawn lengths of several characters (m, i, 1, . should be a good set).

For monospaced fonts they will all be equal, for variable width fonts they won't.

Answer 2

According to this response, Java doesn't know too much about underlying font details, so you'd have to do some comparisons of the font's dimensions.

Answer 3

Probably not applicable for your case, but if you simply want to set the font to a monospaced font, use the logical font name:

Font mono = new Font("Monospaced", Font.PLAIN, 12);

This will be a guaranteed monospaced font on your system.