Extremely slow rendering of Unicode text in JEditorPane
Greetings all,
I have written a Swing app. that handles textual citations from books. I have extended it to support multiple languages, and have been testing it with entering citations in Ancient Greek. This text uses Unicode characters 0370-03F0 (for monotonic modern Greek characters) and characters 1F00-1FFF (which handles Ancient Greek characters, with precombined accents and breathing marks). To render the text, I use a JEditorPane, with HTML markup included to control positioning of the various text chunks.
Provided I use a font that includes Unicode glyphs, such as FreeSans or FreeSerif, the text will render. However, the more characters are rendered, the slower things go. For instance, it can take 15 seconds to render a 500 word citation. With Latin-only characters, the same amount of text renders in under a second. Since I need to be able to handle citations of arbitrary length, this slowness becomes a problem.
Is this a known issue? Mac-only (I use the Mac JDK)? Can it be avoided by using other components than JEditorPane, or by avoiding HTML?
FYI, I am developing on a Mac iBook G3 (900MHz) with OS X 10.3.9, JDK 1.4.2.
Thanks in advance for any help offered.
Erik Norvelle