In a dialogue box why are headers hard to read?

Question

When I open a dialogue box such as Preferences the title of the selected tab is unreadable. Other titles are unaffected.

For example, notice that the first tab should say General.

I am running yEd version 3.21.1 on macOS Big Sur version 11.2.3, although yEd version 3.20.1 exhibited the same behaviour.

Answer 1

I am afraid this is a shortcoming of macOS Big Sur which breaks all kinds of things in Java applications that worked quite well in macOS Catalina. Oracle already announced macOS related improvements for Java 17 which is scheduled for Q3/2021.

If this is a big issue for you, you can try running yEd's cross-platform look and feel as explained in Is it possible to switch to the cross-platform Java look-and-feel? However, being cross-platform means that macOS specific features such as the macOS menu bar will not be available.

Comments

Thank you.

The instructions in the linked article appear to be specific to Microsoft Windows. How do I enable cross-platform mode in macOS?

---

You need to follow the instructions in the paragraph starting with "If you used the yEd Installer for Mac OS X, ..." These are most definitely not specific to Windows.

---

I'm afraid those instructions weren't very clear.

For the benefit of others who may have the same problem.
1) Open the Applications folder in Finder
2) A two-finger click on yEd brings up a context menu; select Show Package Contents
3) Open the Contents folder then open the app folder
4) Open the file yEd.cfg in a text editor
5) The JavaOptions section is at the end of that file add the following line as the last line of the file -
java-options=-Dyed.laf=crossplatform
6) Open the yEd application;  notice that the user interface has changed