Weird font rendering in Netbeans on Linux

Question

I installed NetBeans 6.8 on Linux (Mint, based on Ubuntu 9.10) and I can see that font rendering is very weird. Fonts in NetBeans are just so thin unlike any other program, be it gEdit, Eclipse, Firefox, or whatever.

Does anyone know if it's possible to make fonts in NetBeans look bolder?

Bonus question: AFAIK both Eclipse and NetBeans are written in Java. What gives?

Since a picture's worth a thousand words... screenshot (it won't let me post images)

Answer 1

In my case I just had to add -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd to the netbeans_default_options in the configuration file.

You can find the file under /path/to/netbeans/etc/netbeans.conf.

There's a wiki article on netbeans.org about this topic:

if the antialiasing switch awt.useSystemAAFontSettings is not set, then Swing text renderer tries to detect the optimum setting for given system and use that. Since 1.6 the renderer implements the following options:

• off | false | default - meaning "do not override what has been auto-detected"
• on - use anti-aliasing without sub-pixel rendering
• gasp - use anti-aliasing wit sub-pixel rendering, intended for use both on CRT and LCD
• lcd - use anti-aliasing wit sub-pixel rendering, optimized for LCD
• lcd_hbgr - same as lcd, but with different distribution of sub pixels (monitor upside down)
• lcd_vrgb - same as lcd, but with different distribution of sub pixels (monitor is vertical)
• lcd_vbgr - same as lcd, but with different distribution of sub pixels (vertical again but on other side)

I was using Apache Netbeans 10.0.

Answer 2

Tools > Options > Fonts & Colors

You can set font to Bold on the right Font menu.

Check this post on Sun's blog.

I think Eclipse and NetBeans use different libraries to render fonts.