Hi all:

(I'm new here, hope this is the right place to post this question....)

I'm displaying jconsole running on a RHEL server to X11 on my Mac OS X machine, and am getting some really painfully bad font displays (see attached screenshot). Other programs from the same RHEL machine (e.g. emacs) display without any issues. I'd appreciate any suggestions for ways to get the fonts for jconsole to display in a way that doesn't make my eyes hurt.

Thanks!

Ian
[img]http://www.flickr.com/photos/icrew/4288532335/sizes/o/[/img]

Ouch. "Painfully bad" is a good descriptor.

Does that OS X machine have the same font smoothing preferences as the other machines that display correctly? Does that machine have the same font set? It looks to me like what's happening is that you're seeing a bitmap representation of the font because X11 believes the font isn't installed on that computer, in which case font smoothing will make no difference whatsoever, but if the font IS in fact installed on that Mac there's an off chance that tinkering with font smoothing settings might help.

Thanks for the response tacit (and sorry for the slow follow-up on my part).

To clarify things a bit:
1) This ugliness happens with jconsole on both my macs (one running 10.6, the other 10.5.8 Server).

2) Other X11 apps (such as emacs) display just fine on both macs.

So, based on your response, it seems that it's likely an issue where jconsole is using a font that's not one of the standard fonts installed with the Mac OS X X11 server. What I can't figure out is which font it is, and, once I do, where to get a copy of that font. I've looked for log files, and in console.app, with no luck.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Just to follow up here--I finally figured out the problem:

This seems to happen when the version of JConsole on the remote computer doesn't correspond correctly to the JRE that's running there. So, downloading the correct version of JConsole from Sun/Oracle fixes the problem. It's part of the Java SE Development Kit (for example, the current version as of right now is at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk6-jsp-136632.html

Hope this is useful to someone else!