It's better to have support 'styled' text drawing on Multibyte - Kanji - characters. Now Java has composite font (multi font, or logical font). For instance, when you use 'Serif' font on Win32, it displays \u0000-\u007F by "Times New Roman" and Kanji by "MS Mincho". "Times New Roman" has BOLD or ITALIC face, but not "MS Mincho". Thus, when you display Serif.BOLD, only Roman characters become bold. All Japanese Kanji characters remain PLAIN. This is true for ITALIC or other logical font -- serif, sanseif,... --.

Since now Java2D uses font outline, it can logically calculate, BOLD or ITALIC glyphs from PLAIN outline, it's better to have this feature for multibyte world.
Underlining OS, win95/winNT do this kind of calculation. So Java can do, either. For AWT stuff, uses Native OS drawing capability, it could as OS to draw styled characters. But it require changes.

koushi.takahashi@japan 1998-07-23