A system and method are disclosed for providing additional features in an enhanced version of the portable application program interface, Java Swing. The enhanced API can replace the first generation heavyweight abstract windowing toolkit used by legacy Java application programs, with no changes required to those programs. Thus, legacy applications running on various platforms can benefit from the improved functionality. Among the added features are a consistent, platform neutral GUI look and feel, Unicode font encoding for all text controls, and improved text drawing (based on the use of a high performance Java font rasterizer). The enhanced version of Swing is referred to herein as AWTSwing.