Run the attached small code snippet on Windows. In draws three lines of characters on a Canvas which is also Printable. Pressing 'p' would send this Printable to your default printer.

Now, if the font set is Webdings or (perhaps more interesting) Symbol, on the screen there will be placeholder rectangles but paper printout will contain pictographs (or Greek letters in case of Symbol) mapped to correspondent ASCII places in the fonts.

It works this way with just about any supported version of JDK started from 1.5 -- so it is not a regression -- feel free to downgrade it to P4.
I observe this behavior on Windows platforms only. For instance my Ubuntu 12.04 would print rectangles very consistently.

Note the many manual test failures in https://jbs.oracle.com/bugs/browse/INTJDK-7600811 (internal test).