Some feature requests/improvement suggestions for the JavaFX Font API

[Glavo]

Has anyone seen this email?

Glavo

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 2:29 AM Glavo <zjx001202 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We noticed that the Font API had many bugs and inconsistencies, and was
> missing a lot of functionality.
> Unfortunately, I don't have enough knowledge in this field to solve them.
> So I'm making some feature requests/improvement suggestions on this to see
> if anyone is interested.
>
> 1. Unify the meaning of "font family".
>
> Currently "font family" has different meanings on different platforms:
>
>    - On Windows, it usually means the localized name of the font family
>    name (nameID=1);
>    - On Linux,  it usually means the non-localized font family name
>    (nameID=1, langID=0x0);
>    - On macOS,  it usually means the non-localized typographical family
>    name (nameID=16, langID=0x0).
>
> This inconsistency makes the behavior of the program confusing and it is
> impossible to know what will happen without testing on multiple platforms.
>
> I want JavaFX to use the non-localized typographical family name
> (nameID=16, langID=0x0) on all platforms.
> The reason is that the font family name (nameID=1) of many fonts actually
> contains the font style information,
> and using it makes it difficult for us to select font style.
>
> For example, if we want to get JetBrains Mono Bold on Windows, we need to
> use Font.font("JetBrains Mono", FontWeight.BOLD, 13),
> but to get JetBrains Mono ExtraBold, we need to use Font.font("JetBrains
> Mono ExtraBold", FontWeight.NORMAL, 13).
> This is really frustrating :(
>
> Additionally, I encountered a bug on macOS that prevented me from
> selecting the font weight.
> I explained this issue in a previous email:
> https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2025-July/055417.html
>
> 2. Make Font.font(String) accept both font name and font family name.
>
> I wish Font.font(String) could accept more names than just the font
> family name.
>
> As mentioned in the previous section, the current concept of font family
> names in JavaFX is confusing and often contains font style information.
> Therefore, it is very difficult to use the Font.font(String) in the
> correct way.
> If it would accept a variety of font names, both localized and
> non-localized, it would be less difficult to use.
>
> 3. Add more methods to get font localized names
>
> I would like to get these methods in Font class to get the localized name
> of the font:
>
>    - static Map<Locale, String> getLocalizedFamilyNames(String family)
>    - static String getLocalizedFamilyName(String family, Locale locale)
>    - static String getLocalizedFontNames(Locale locale)
>    - static String getLocalizedFontNames(String family, Locale locale)
>    - Map<Locale, String> getLocalizedNames()
>    - String getLocalizedName(Locale locale)
>    - Map<Locale, String> getLocalizedFamily()
>    - String getLocalizedFamily(Locale locale)
>
> 4. More methods for handling font styles
>
> Right now we can only use FontWeight and FontPosture to select a font
> style when looking up a font,
> but the only way to get the style from a given Font object is
> Font::getStyle(), which is very asymmetrical.
>
> I would like to get these methods to handle font styles:
>
>    - static List<String> getStyles(String family)
>    - static Font font(String family, String style)
>    - FontWeight getWeight()
>    - FontPosture getPosture()
>
> 5. Support fallback fonts and CSS font list for UI controls
> 6. Provides a way to control the typographic features of fonts
>       Refer to Flutter's FontFeature class:
> https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/dart-ui/FontFeature-class.html
>
> Glavo
>
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