I have an aliasing anomaly when drawing in a custom gui external. Currently the text layout is created and added to a jbox_layer. I've already tried creating the text in the paint routine, using both jtextlayout and using the higher level jtext . Here are two pngs showing the difference between text aliasing in the max UIbutton object, and my gui object. Both are using Arial 12 regular (though I have tried many fonts, they all alias quite badly). Further, there is no magnification or zooming setup in my external. Another option I considered is to make pngs of all my buttons. Unfortunately I need the ability to have user defined button names. If anyone could chime in with any thoughts on this, I would be more than interested.