Currently all Western European locales choose the fonts from a
single file, "font.properties".

With the introduction of support for iso8859-15, it is desirable to
provide a single file for font properties for these languages when used
with iso8859-15 encoding, "font.properties.ISO8859_15_FDIS".

Without this change, several identical copies of these font
properties will need to be provided for each of the languages involved.
In addition, languages not directly supported will not be able to default
to the correct font properties.

The current JDK1.1 search code (from sun.awt.PlatformFont) tries these
files in this order:

$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>
$HOME/lib/font.properties

These should be added (just ahead of the font.properties without suffix):

$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<encoding>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<encoding>

The current AWT JDK1.2 search code (from sun.awt.PlatformFont) is the same,
and must change the same way.

The current SWING JDK1.2 search code (from sun.java2d.SunGraphicsEnvironment)
tries these files in this order:

$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>.<osVersion>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>.<osVersion>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>_<encoding>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>.<osVersion>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>.<osVersion>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<region>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>.<osVersion>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>.<osVersion>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>_<encoding>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>.<osVersion>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>.<osVersion>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<lang>
$HOME/lib/font.properties.<osVersion>
$HOME/lib/font.properties
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties.<osVersion>
$JAVA_HOME/lib/font.properties

A similar change should be made here.

Question 1)
Why are these search paths different????

Question 2)
When using the UTF-8 locales, the user could reasonably choose
either the default (iso8859-1) or the new iso8859-15 font
  properties, depending which characters he wishes to see in his GUI.
How can he specify?

Question 3)
How does a Japanese user display a Euro character in his GUI?
Does there need to be a Japanese font properties file based on
iso8859-1 and another based on iso8859-15? And how would he choose?

This is an immediate problem for JDK1.1.7 and JDK1.2.