Hi As i started programming by jdk6, i had no problem in text components neither in awt nor in swing. But for labels or titles of awt components, yes : I couldn't have Farsi characters displayable on AWTs just as simple as Swing by typing them into the source code. lets check this SSCCE :

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Properties;

public class EmptyFarsiCharsOnAWT extends JFrame{

public EmptyFarsiCharsOnAWT() {
    super("????");
    setDefaultCloseOperation(3);
    setVisible(rootPaneCheckingEnabled);
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws AWTException, IOException {
    JFrame jFrame = new EmptyFarsiCharsOnAWT();
    MenuItem show ;
    // approach 1 = HardCoding :
    /*
    show = new MenuItem("\u0646\u0645\u0627\u06cc\u0634");
     *
     */

    // approach 2 = using simple utf-8 saved text file :
    /*
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("farsiLabels.txt"));
        String showLabel = in.readLine();
        in.close();

        show = new MenuItem(showLabel);
     *
     */

     // approach 3 = using properties file :

    FileReader in = new FileReader("farsiLabels.properties");
    Properties farsiLabels = new Properties();
    farsiLabels.load(in);
    show = new MenuItem(farsiLabels.getProperty("tray.show"));
    PopupMenu popUp = new PopupMenu();
    popUp.add(show);

        // creating Tray object
        Image iconIamge = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("greenIcon.png");

        TrayIcon trayIcon = new TrayIcon(iconIamge, null, popUp);
        SystemTray tray = SystemTray.getSystemTray();
        tray.add(trayIcon);

        jFrame.setIconImage(iconIamge);
    } 
}  

Yes, i know each of three approaches in source code does right when you may test it from IDE , but if you make a JAR contains just this class, by means of NetBeans > project > clean&build ,you won't see the expected characters and will just get EMPTY/BLANK SQUARES !

Unfortunately, opposed to other situations i encountered before, here there is no way to avoid using awt and make use of Swing in this case. And this was just an SSCCE i made to show the problem and my recent (also first) application suffers from this subject.

Note: it seems i can not attach anything, so the contents od the text file would be this: ????? and the contents of properties file:

#Sun May 02 09:45:10 IRDT 2010   
tray.show=?????

but i don't think by giving you the unicode-scape sequence, these would be necessary any way...

And i think should have to let you know I posted this question a while ago in SDN and "the Java Ranch" forums and other native forums and still I'm watching...

By the way i am using latest version of Netbeans IDE...

I will be so grateful if anybody has a solution to this damn AWT components never rendered any Farsi character for me...

Thanks in advance