Why could a Java Swing program not display German characters such as umlauts (ä, ö, ...)?

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The Swing program shows wrong characters instead of German umlauts. This button should be "Schließen", for example: enter image description here. This occurs for all UI elements as far as I can see.

The code to create the UI is nothing unusual, for example:

about = new JButton("");
about.setToolTipText("Über das Programm");

I already checked following things:

  1. The encoding of the .java files is utf-8 (checked with VS code)
  2. The font is javax.swing.plaf.FontUIResource[family=Dialog,name=Dialog,style=bold,size=12]. Dialog appears to be the default font, so it would be strange if it did not support umlauts. But I have not found a way to check this, because when I check my installed fonts through windows I don't find a font called "Dialog".

The project also uses gradle (6.8).

What could be a reason for this behaviour? When I talked to somebody who compiled the same program on Linux they didn't seem to have this problem.

Edit:

I also found code such as this:

JLabel test = new JLabel();
test.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.PLAIN, 12));
test.setText("<html>Something with ß</html>");

Arial surely supports umlauts, but this code still did not display the ß correctly

gradle swing java
1 Answers

Parse source code as UTF-8

Thanks to the commenters I could get to the bottom of the issue: The compiler was not parsing my source code as UTF-8 character encoding.

I had to add following to my build.gradle file:

compileJava {
    options.encoding = 'UTF-8'
}
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