All fonts within the same font family have a similar appearance because they are all made from the same glyph set. Likewise, different fonts families use different glyph sets to achieve their own distinguishing look. A font family not only consists of fonts with a similar appearance, but also different points sizes and styles. Helvetica 10 point bold and Helvetica 12 point italic are two fonts in the same family, and Times Roman 8 point bold and Times Roman 10 point regular are two fonts in a different font family. Find Available Fonts To use a font, you have to create a Font object, and to do that, you need to know what fonts are available on the system and their names.
Fonts have logical, family and font names.
The logical name is a name mapped onto one of the specific fonts available on the platform. The family name is the name of the font family that determines the typographic design across several faces, such as Helvetica or Times Roman. To get the family name for a given Font object, call java.awt.Font.getFamily . The font name represents a specific font within a family such as Helvetica Bold. To get the font name, call java.awt.Font.getFontName , and to determine which font faces are available on a system, call java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getAllFonts.