I get that response sometimes, and it almost always turns out the person that thinks the text "looks fine" is not using AA, subpixel rendering, etc.

I snapped a picture of a GNOME menu overlayed on top of Netbeans, so Netbeans' complete failure to match the fonts of the GNOME desktop is made crystal clear: http://bit.ly/eSQy3d

I'm running KDE/Fedora as my main machine, and Netbean fonts made my eyes bleed. This precipitated a flurry of searches as to how to fix the problem -- my desktop fonts are pretty, but the Netbean ones are awful.

Rather quickly you'll find that there are two tracks, one is to change the config/command line parameter to launch it (I believe it's: -J-Dswing.aatext=true), the other is to use the official Oracle JVM/JDK, and version 6, along with ensure Netbeans is launching with that (see JAVA_HOME). It has better font rendering/handling. I've done the former, but haven't bothered with the latter, as I prefer Fedora managing my packages.

I hope that helps.

It's a hack of of course, but you can set `swing.aatext=true system-wide`. Run:

   sudo java -jar jpui.jar

and set that property under System. `jpui.jar` can be get from http://jpui.sourceforge.net/

The other related property is `awt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on`

Is it bad that I think that looks just fine? What am I missing?

I think Netbeans is not getting the font settings from GNOME. From what I can see from the panel, GNOME uses slight font hinting here. But the Netbeans window uses full hinting.

The fix would be to roll our own matching ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf for all the non-GNOME applications.

As of the last time I tried Netbeans (I have long since moved exclusively to Vim), this was not successful either. I have my font preferences replicated in ~/.fonts.conf and I could not get Netbeans to use those settings either.