[Biojava-l] Nasty JDK 1.4 graphics bugs

[Keith James]

This is a heads up about some serious bugs in 1.4 Graphics2D which
have just caught me out and may be worth taking into consideration if
you are using the sequence renderers.

Symptom 1:

With antialiasing off

PairwiseDiagonalRenderer shows *many* fewer lines than expected but
also shows artefactual lines in the wrong places. All the hundreds of
missing lines appear if antialiasing is turned on and the artefactual
lines vanish. Unfortunately, this results in symptom 2 below.

Symptom 2:

With antialising on

sun.dc.pr.PRException: endPath: bad path at
        sun.dc.pr.Rasterizer.endPath(Rasterizer.java:537) at
        sun.java2d.pipe.DuctusRenderer.createShapeRasterizer
        (DuctusRenderer.java:374)
        etc.

when drawing lines. Probably related to bug 4485298 (reported Jul 27,
2001, in progress).

To sum up, we're currently hosed with 1.4 for Graphics2D plotting long
lines/lots of lines. Use Java 1.3 where all of this works properly.

k. (annoyed)

-- 

- Keith James <kdj@sanger.ac.uk> bioinformatics programming support -
- Pathogen Sequencing Unit, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK -