I have been receiving a lot of messages the last couple of months regarding the text in GMapsFX applications looking “garbled”, as illustrated in the screenshot below.

This is appears to only affect applications running on Mac OSX.  GMapsFX makes use of the JavaFX WebView component under the hood, so I created a simple test app that loads Google Maps into a WebView to confirm the issue was the WebView component.

I filed a bug report with Oracle, but apparently this is a known issue that affects only some websites in WebView on Mac. Linux and Windows applications using the WebView component are unaffected.

http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=JDK-8088205

The issue has been open for a couple of years now which leads me to think that a recent Mac update may be contributing to the problem becoming more widespread.

Unfortunately a fix for this won’t be available until Java 9, and there is no work around that I know of.