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FAQs

Fonts

NOTE: This material does not necessarily refer to the most recent version of Java. For the most recent FAQs, see here.

font.properties

The document Adding Fonts to the Java Runtime JDK 1.2 states that "font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7" is provided by the JDK, but I cannot find any properties files that end with 5.7. Can you help me find this file, as I am having trouble running applications on Chinese Solaris 7?
I'm trying to write a GUI that displays a text field in Russian but all I'm getting is garbage displayed. I can toggle between English and Russian keyboard in my e-mail and wordprocessor, but when I toggle to Russian and try to type in my text field in my Java application, all I get is garbage. Can you help me with this?
How do I distribute fonts with my application without asking end users to edit their font.properties file?
What exactly are Physical Fonts?

Resource Bundles

I have been reading the JDK 1.1 internationalization rules and there is some ambiguity. Can you tell me what encodings Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand? ISO 8859-1 seems to work on my Mac, so does this mean that the whole UTF-8 will work?
I have developed a Java application that uses Locale and Resource Bundles to internationalize my application. It works fine for most languages where I have an ASCII based properties file for each language. My problem is that this does not work for Chinese, as Chinese characters cannot be stored in an ASCII file. Can you tell me some other way to localise my application for Chinese?
Are there any plans to allow properties files to be in other encodings?

font.properties

The document Adding Fonts to the Java Runtime JDK 1.2 states that "font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7" is provided by the JDK, but I cannot find any properties files that end with 5.7. Can you help me find this file, as I am having trouble running applications on Chinese Solaris 7?
font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7 does not exist in java software ref implementation, font.properties.zh_EUC_CN should work for 2.7 zh locale. Are you sure the font -sun-song-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 is installed in your env (check your xset setting)? You may ask JTG guys if you are talking about Solaris product release.

The document mentioned in your question is out of date, at least regarding the naming space of the font.properties file.

I'm trying to write a GUI that displays a text field in Russian but all I'm getting is garbage displayed. I can toggle between English and Russian keyboard in my e-mail and wordprocessor, but when I toggle to Russian and try to type in my text field in my Java application, all I get is garbage. Can you help me with this?
Are you writing your GUI with AWT or Swing? What fonts are you using in your text components? Are the fonts you are using in your text components the ones defined in the font.properties file, with names like serif, san serif and so on? If not, they should be.

As an experiment, try making a very simple program with just a Swing JTextField. Use the Lucida Sans font. Here is a code fragment showing what I mean:

JTextField t = new JTextField("Hello World"); Font f = new Font("Lucida Sans", Font.PLAIN, 18); t.setFont( f );

How do I distribute fonts with my application without asking end users to edit their font.properties file?
JDk 1.3 has added a method:

Font.createFont(int fontFormat, InputStream fontStream)

which reads the font from an arbitrary inputstream.

What exactly are Physical Fonts?
For an explanation of Physical Fonts and their uses, see Physical Fonts

Resource Bundles

I have been reading the JDK 1.1 internationalization rules and there is some ambiguity. Can you tell me what encodings Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand? ISO 8859-1 seems to work on my Mac, so does this mean that the whole UTF-8 will work?
Yes, the 1.1 documentation was rather poor. It's a lot clearer in 1.3 - see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/util/PropertyResourceBundle.html.

The only encoding that Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand is ISO 8859-1 with Unicode escapes. This is not UTF-8. UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters into sequences of 1 to 4 bytes using a mapping specified in The Unicode Standard, version 2.0 or 3.0. Other encodings need to be converted with the native2ascii tool. This applies to all releases from 1.1 to 1.3.

I have developed a Java application that uses Locale and Resource Bundles to internationalize my application. It works fine for most languages where I have an ASCII based properties file for each language. My problem is that this does not work for Chinese, as Chinese characters cannot be stored in an ASCII file. Can you tell me some other way to localise my application for Chinese?
This is a common problem. PropertyResourceBundles are limited to storing what can be expressed by a .properties file. For historical compatability reasons, .properties files are always encoded using the ISO 8859-1 character encoding. This means you can't put Chinese characters directly into a .properties file. There is a work around however. .properties files recognize the uxxxx notation for expressing Unicode characters outside the 8859-1 character set. What you can do is create your .properties file using a character encoding that works for you, then convert it to 8859-1 with uxxxx escapes using the native2ascii program that comes with the JDK.

Are there any plans to allow properties files to be in other encodings?
A request for enhancement/bug id was generated for this:
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4221013.html, but it was closed because the choice was made to allow Properties files to use the uxxxx notation to represent characters outside of 8859-1. This is a very inconvenient notation but it results in portable Properties files that are backwards compatible. We eased the burden of this choice (we hoped) by adding the native2ascii tool which would allow you to write your Properties files in any encoding then convert them to the required form.

So what you can do is preprocess using native2ascii....or use ListResourceBundles and compile them using
javac -encoding <encoding>.

Back to Question Category Page.


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FAQs

Fonts

NOTE: This material does not necessarily refer to the most recent version of Java. For the most recent FAQs, see here.

font.properties

The document Adding Fonts to the Java Runtime JDK 1.2 states that "font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7" is provided by the JDK, but I cannot find any properties files that end with 5.7. Can you help me find this file, as I am having trouble running applications on Chinese Solaris 7?
I'm trying to write a GUI that displays a text field in Russian but all I'm getting is garbage displayed. I can toggle between English and Russian keyboard in my e-mail and wordprocessor, but when I toggle to Russian and try to type in my text field in my Java application, all I get is garbage. Can you help me with this?
How do I distribute fonts with my application without asking end users to edit their font.properties file?
What exactly are Physical Fonts?

Resource Bundles

I have been reading the JDK 1.1 internationalization rules and there is some ambiguity. Can you tell me what encodings Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand? ISO 8859-1 seems to work on my Mac, so does this mean that the whole UTF-8 will work?
I have developed a Java application that uses Locale and Resource Bundles to internationalize my application. It works fine for most languages where I have an ASCII based properties file for each language. My problem is that this does not work for Chinese, as Chinese characters cannot be stored in an ASCII file. Can you tell me some other way to localise my application for Chinese?
Are there any plans to allow properties files to be in other encodings?

font.properties

The document Adding Fonts to the Java Runtime JDK 1.2 states that "font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7" is provided by the JDK, but I cannot find any properties files that end with 5.7. Can you help me find this file, as I am having trouble running applications on Chinese Solaris 7?
font.properties.zh_EUC_CN.5.7 does not exist in java software ref implementation, font.properties.zh_EUC_CN should work for 2.7 zh locale. Are you sure the font -sun-song-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 is installed in your env (check your xset setting)? You may ask JTG guys if you are talking about Solaris product release.

The document mentioned in your question is out of date, at least regarding the naming space of the font.properties file.

I'm trying to write a GUI that displays a text field in Russian but all I'm getting is garbage displayed. I can toggle between English and Russian keyboard in my e-mail and wordprocessor, but when I toggle to Russian and try to type in my text field in my Java application, all I get is garbage. Can you help me with this?
Are you writing your GUI with AWT or Swing? What fonts are you using in your text components? Are the fonts you are using in your text components the ones defined in the font.properties file, with names like serif, san serif and so on? If not, they should be.

As an experiment, try making a very simple program with just a Swing JTextField. Use the Lucida Sans font. Here is a code fragment showing what I mean:

JTextField t = new JTextField("Hello World"); Font f = new Font("Lucida Sans", Font.PLAIN, 18); t.setFont( f );

How do I distribute fonts with my application without asking end users to edit their font.properties file?
JDk 1.3 has added a method:

Font.createFont(int fontFormat, InputStream fontStream)

which reads the font from an arbitrary inputstream.

What exactly are Physical Fonts?
For an explanation of Physical Fonts and their uses, see Physical Fonts

Resource Bundles

I have been reading the JDK 1.1 internationalization rules and there is some ambiguity. Can you tell me what encodings Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand? ISO 8859-1 seems to work on my Mac, so does this mean that the whole UTF-8 will work?
Yes, the 1.1 documentation was rather poor. It's a lot clearer in 1.3 - see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/util/PropertyResourceBundle.html.

The only encoding that Properties and PropertyResourceBundle understand is ISO 8859-1 with Unicode escapes. This is not UTF-8. UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters into sequences of 1 to 4 bytes using a mapping specified in The Unicode Standard, version 2.0 or 3.0. Other encodings need to be converted with the native2ascii tool. This applies to all releases from 1.1 to 1.3.

I have developed a Java application that uses Locale and Resource Bundles to internationalize my application. It works fine for most languages where I have an ASCII based properties file for each language. My problem is that this does not work for Chinese, as Chinese characters cannot be stored in an ASCII file. Can you tell me some other way to localise my application for Chinese?
This is a common problem. PropertyResourceBundles are limited to storing what can be expressed by a .properties file. For historical compatability reasons, .properties files are always encoded using the ISO 8859-1 character encoding. This means you can't put Chinese characters directly into a .properties file. There is a work around however. .properties files recognize the uxxxx notation for expressing Unicode characters outside the 8859-1 character set. What you can do is create your .properties file using a character encoding that works for you, then convert it to 8859-1 with uxxxx escapes using the native2ascii program that comes with the JDK.

Are there any plans to allow properties files to be in other encodings?
A request for enhancement/bug id was generated for this:
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4221013.html, but it was closed because the choice was made to allow Properties files to use the uxxxx notation to represent characters outside of 8859-1. This is a very inconvenient notation but it results in portable Properties files that are backwards compatible. We eased the burden of this choice (we hoped) by adding the native2ascii tool which would allow you to write your Properties files in any encoding then convert them to the required form.

So what you can do is preprocess using native2ascii....or use ListResourceBundles and compile them using
javac -encoding <encoding>.

Back to Question Category Page.


	About Sun \| About This Site \| Newsletters \| Contact Us \| Employment How to Buy \| Licensing \| Terms of Use \| Privacy \| Trademarks Copyright Sun Microsystems, Inc.		A Sun Developer Network Site Unless otherwise licensed, code in all technical manuals herein (including articles, FAQs, samples) is provided under this License. Content Feeds