Well you cant learn java by using netBeans. netBeans is for ppl that
know the J classes. I suggest thet you drop netBeans and do it the
hard way the first time. Otherwise you are wasting your time by using
it. I suggest that you use eclipse, you wil learn the classes very
fast with that.

Joseph Gruber wrote:

You don't say how far along you are. Have you seen this?
<http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/text.html>

About 10 years ago now (whew! has it been that long?) I was tasked with
writing an IBM 3270 mainframe terminal emulator in Java. We were using AWT
at the time, but not that much has changed when you're doing this kind of
application. Our screen size was 24 rows x 80 columns. We used a fixed-pitch
font (monospace). We listened to the component resize event.

On each size event, we calculated the largest font that would fit into the
available space (vertical and horizontal), by iterating through the font
sizes starting at 1 point, and creating a new font, looking at the font
metrics (advance and height + descent, IIRC). When the font got too big, we
went back to the previous point size, and used that one. We never found a
more efficient way to do this, but it was actually fast enough. The screen
and the font would resize in real time as the user dragged the window
border.

You could try officially calculating the font size for a window:

There is a method somewhere that tells you resolution (e.g., my monitor
is 96 DPI) (GraphicsDevice?), and there are 72 points per inch, so a 12
point font would be (theoretically) 16 pixels high on my monitor.

int calculateFontSize(int newHeight) {
   double lineHeight = newHeight/20.0;
   double pixperpoint = {dpi}/72.0;
   double fontSize = lineHeight/pixperpoint;
   return (int)(fontSize+1e-5); // Round up slightly to avoid fp-error
}