Comment 68 for bug 255983

Just lost some hours trying to get this working on my Jaunty installation.

I also found that modifying the fontconfig.properties file resolved the problem.
I'm currently using fr_BE.UTF-8 as my locale.

The remaining problem does not come from some bug in the jdk, but only the UTF-8 fonts configuration.

The fontconfig.properties file contains the following line:
sequence.allfonts.UTF-8=latin-1,wqy-zenhei,japanese-vlgothic,japanese-kochi,japanese-sazanami,korean-un,korean-baekmuk,bengali,oriya,telugu
If you remove the last three groups it solves the problem.

It seems the openjdk code tries to get a maximum character size, and since the bengali,oriya,telugu characters takes more vertical space than latin-1 one, the global vertical space is increased.

For info, Sun's jdk (as seen in the sun-java6-jdk package) does not include those fonts.

I did not searched who is responsible of this fontconfig.properties file Ubuntu, Debian or upstream, but either there is a more compact font for those languages, or they should be removed from the list (as other languages like hindi, tamil, ...)