To render multilingual text, using logical fonts, 2D now takes advantage of installed host OS fonts for all supported writing systems. For example, if you run in a Thai locale environment, but have Korean fonts installed, both Thai and Korean are rendered. The J2RE now also automatically detects physical fonts that are installed into its lib/fonts/fallback directory and adds these physical fonts to all logical fonts for 2D rendering.
AWT now uses the Unicode APIs on Windows 2000/XP. As a result, some of its components can handle text without being restricted by Windows locale settings. For example, AWT text components can accept and display text in the Devanagari writing system regardless of the Windows locale settings.
Refer to the documentation at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/index.html.