How do I use FontAwesome 6 icons that are based on a true type font into a Icon for use in Java

Question

This answer from madprogrammer shows how I can display a FontAwesome icon on a JLabel Font Awesome with Swing but my action code is of the form

public class EmptyDatabaseAction extends AbstractAction
{

    public EmptyDatabaseAction()
    {
        super(TextLabel.MENU_EMPTY_DB.getMsg());
        this.putValue(Action.SMALL_ICON, Icons.EMPTY_DATABASE.getIconSmall());
        this.putValue(Action.LARGE_ICON_KEY, Icons.EMPTY_DATABASE.getIconLarge());
        this.putValue(Action.SHORT_DESCRIPTION,TextLabel.MENU_EMPTY_DB.getMsg());
    }
    .....
}

I.e I define a SMALL_ICON and LARGE_ICON_KEY, it expects subclass of Icon (actually ImageIcon), but the FontAwesome is based on Fonts, so how do I convert a Font based image to an Icon ?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '23 at 13:59

Got it working, merged code from two answers to Font Awesome with Swing, madprogrammers and jIconFont code.

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.InputStream;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import javax.swing.*;

public class FontAwesomeImageCreator
{

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        InputStream is = FontAwesomeImageCreator.class.getResourceAsStream("/fa-thin-100.ttf");
        Font font = Font.createFont(Font.TRUETYPE_FONT, is);
        font = font.deriveFont(Font.PLAIN, 128f);
        saveImage("\ue024", font, Color.BLACK, "radar.png");
        saveImage("\ue024", font, Color.WHITE, "radar_dark.png");
    }


    private static void saveImage(String text, Font font, Color color, String filename) throws Exception
    {
        BufferedImage bi = buildImage (text, font, color);
        File outputfile = new File("C:\\Code\\icons", filename);
        ImageIO.write(bi, "png", outputfile);
    }

    private static BufferedImage buildImage(String text, Font font, Color color) {
        JLabel label = new JLabel(text);
        label.setForeground(color);
        label.setFont(font);
        Dimension dim = label.getPreferredSize();
        int width = dim.width + 1;
        int height = dim.height + 1;
        label.setSize(width, height);
        BufferedImage bufImage =
                new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
        Graphics2D g2d = bufImage.createGraphics();
        g2d.setRenderingHint(
                RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING,
                RenderingHints.VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
        g2d.setRenderingHint(
                RenderingHints.KEY_FRACTIONALMETRICS,
                RenderingHints.VALUE_FRACTIONALMETRICS_ON);
        label.print(g2d);
        g2d.dispose();
        return bufImage;
    }

}

So in this example hardcoded to use the Font Awesome 6 thin style, ands create a transparent black and white bitmap image of size 128 x 128 for the radar icon. Could be easily enough parameterized for more general use.

How do I use FontAwesome 6 icons that are based on a true type font into a Icon for use in Java

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