Can I set the DPI resolution of my Java Swing application without changing the systems' DPI setting?

java swing testing accessibility dpi
Daniel Rikowski picture Daniel Rikowski · Jul 9, 2009 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I have a Java application using the Substance LookAndFeel with Windows as the the target platform and I want to increase the DPI setting of my application without changing the system setting.

I want to do this because I don't want to force the user to restart Windows and because many Windows applications seem to have problems with very high DPI settings (> 120)

PS: I'm aware that the Substance LaF allows to scale the font size at runtime, but that way only the height of my controls are scaled, not the width. I want my GUI fully scaled as it would happen if I set the system's DPI setting.

Answer

Joel Carranza picture Joel Carranza · Nov 12, 2009

Don't know if that is possible. The look&feel would have to support it, and as far as I know, the Windows Look&Feel does not. Here's a hack which you may consider: Iterate through all the fonts defined in your look&feel and redefine them to be slighly bigger. Here is a code snippet that does this:

for (Iterator i = UIManager.getLookAndFeelDefaults().keySet().iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
    String key = (String) i.next();
    if(key.endsWith(".font")) {
        Font font = UIManager.getFont(key);
        Font biggerFont = font.deriveFont(2.0f*font.getSize2D());
        // change ui default to bigger font
        UIManager.put(key,biggerFont);
    }
}

I suppose you could take this one step further and redefine scale borders proportionally as well, but that gets very complicated very quickly

Related questions

Automated tests for Java Swing GUIs

What options are there for building automated tests for GUIs written in Java Swing? I'd like to test some GUIs which have been written using the NetBeans Swing GUI Builder, so something that works without requiring special tampering of the …

Read More
Automated GUI Testing

I am writing a Java Desktop Application (SWING) using Netbeans IDE 6.9. I want to do automated GUI testing. All I know about testing is JUnit tests which won't apply for my GUI application. Is there a particular testing framework I …

Read More
How to add an image to a JPanel?

I have a JPanel to which I'd like to add JPEG and PNG images that I generate on the fly. All the examples I've seen so far in the Swing Tutorials, specially in the Swing examples use ImageIcons. I'm generating …

Read More