I've been toying with antialiasing and found that with a Graphics2D object, supplying the TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON hint accomplished exactly nothing, although the Font2DTest demo applet uses it successfully, although apparently with a Canvas object.

ANTIALIAS_ON -does- indeed work for both text and other graphics primitives, but I can't for the life of me figure out why text_antialias isn't working.

This is in an X11 environment on a Solaris box. I haven't checked to see if it happens elsewhere.