The JTextArea on the Windows Look and Feel on XP should use the same font as the other text components (usually Tahoma 11) but we cannot simply change it because some applications depend on the current fixed font for code editors and the like. We need to find a backward compatible solution. The current workaround is to manually set the defaults for text area to use the same as text field; something like UIDefaults.put("TextArea.font",UIDefaults.get("TextField.font"));