The new JTable printing API (final putback awaiting approval) should support printing in headless mode. While trying to test against the Swing workspace, printing failed every time with a hotspot error. On discovering this, I wrote up a simple test case that does nothing more than try to print 10 pages to a file (test case attached).

The test should be run with the flag -Djava.awt.headless=true

When run against 1.4.2, the test succeeds.

When run against the current Swing workspace, it produces a hotspot error with the following text, and a hotpot error log which is attached:

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#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
# EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x6d61cebc, pid=192, tid=184
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.5.0-beta-b23 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# V [jvm.dll+0x8cebc]
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as hs_err_pid192.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
#

Note that a bug in the current promoted workspace prevents this crash from being
seen because you will get a stack trace instead. See 4936074 for more details (including the simple fix which you can apply to your workspace for the purposes of reproducing the crash above).