I’ve just come up against an interesting problem while loading custom TrueType fonts bundled with a Java Swing GUI built using Maven.

Initially, for simplicity and because I’d never actually tried creating custom fonts from TTF files before, I loaded the TTF file from an absolute location i.e. not relative to the JAR classpath. Everything worked fine so I proceeded to package the TTF file as a regular resource file packaged into my JAR from the standard Maven src/main/resources directory, and changed the font loading code to load it relative to the JAR classpath. That’s when strange things started to happen…

I noticed that certain glyphs in the font were very subtlely wrong. For example, the top of all “S” glyphs was squashed slightly. I switched my code back to using an absolute file path (referencing the /src/main/resources location) and everything looked fine again. That got me wondering if the font file could be getting corrupted somehow when being packaged into the JAR.

And then it dawned on me… I’m filtering other resources so could that be the problem?

You bet it was!

It turns out that the TTF file was being filtered when packaged into the JAR. As soon as I excluded TTF files from this filtering, everything worked as expected again.

So, the moral of this is watch out for resource filtering when using TrueType font files (or any other file that could potentially be damaged by undesirable filtering).