just (astonishingly ;-) noticed the reason why apps look so cramped on my win6+ machines (same for Vista and Win7, both with 120dpi setting, jdk6 and jdk7): the control font looked up from the the desktop property has both the wrong font family and the wrong size:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Font guiFont = (Font) Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getDesktopProperty("win.defaultGUI.font");
    int guiSize = guiFont.getSize();
    Font iconFont = (Font) Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getDesktopProperty("win.icon.font");
    System.out.println("gui default: " + guiFont + "\nicon default: " + iconFont);
}

output:

gui default: java.awt.Font[family=Tahoma,name=Tahoma,style=plain,size=13]
icon default: java.awt.Font[family=Segoe UI,name=Segoe UI,style=plain,size=15]

The latter is used in native applications for nearly all text, while Swing uses the former ...

Questions:

  • Could there be any reason for this, or just a bug?
  • Who's responsible: the Swing lookup (when reading-in the desktopProperty from relevant system resources) or the OS in not reporting it correctly?
  • How to force the usage of the latter?

Options for solving the last:

  • With full control about the LAF one might consider to set all relevant text fonts (that's what JGoodies does, factored into a FontPolicy/Set).
  • A dirty hack is to set the value of the defaultGUI desktop property to the correct value - it involves reflective access to the toolkit, which naturally will blow in security constrained contexts.
  • ??

Edit

Just in case anybody is interested, here's the dirty hack:

/**
 * Replaces the default gui desktop font property with the icon font
 * if the former is smaller.
 * 
 */
public static void ensureDefaultGUIFontSize() {
    Toolkit toolkit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
    Font guiFont =
java swing windows-7 fonts
Edit
Report