Symptoms

Non ASCII (Latin) characters are not being displayed or are replaced with squares. This is known to appear in at least the below areas:

  1. Charting
  2. Workflow Image Screen

For example:

Cause

The chart is generated on the JIRA server side. To generate this image, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that JIRA runs in uses operating system fonts. If those are not available, it will display these square characters.

There was a bug raised for this under JCHART-369 that was closed as won't fix as it relates to the JVM configuration.

Resolution


The JVM needs to have the missing fonts installed. For example, to fix this for Korean fonts in Debian/Ubuntu, the following will need to be done:

  1. Install the missing fonts with the following:

    sudo apt-get install ttf-unfontssudo apt-get install ttf-baekmuk
    CODE
  2. Copy those fonts into the $JAVA_HOME/lib/fonts/fallback directory. In this example, they would be installed by apt-get into /usr/share/fonts/truetype.
  3. Stop JIRA.
  4. As these images can be cached, the following directory will need to be removed:

    $JIRA_HOME/caches/workflowimages

    (info) It will be rebuilt upon restart or if a new image is rendered.

  5. Start JIRA.
  6. Clear the browser cache.
  7. Test by viewing the workflow or reloading the chart.

(info) For more information regarding this configuration option, including how to identify the fonts to install, please refer to Font Configuration Files documentation from Oracle.