What's wrong with Java FX's bold handling?

Question

Getting a bold label in JavaFX should be as simple as:

<Label text="Some bold text" style='-fx-font-weight: bold'/>

but it seems it is not.

Looking thru some Q&A in stackoverflow i found:

• Javafx font derive bold
• FXML Label text bold
• Using Arial Unicode MS BOLD in JavaFX
• Java FX: Bold and Italic styles are not getting applied for some of the font families

which show that people get mixed mileage. There are a few thousand views on most of these questions but only a few upvotes and comments with mixed results. In some contexts things seem to run fine in others not at all. Unfortunately i am on the "not at all" side on my Mac OS High Sierra with

java version "1.8.0_152"

So i wonder what the reason is that things do not work "out of the box" and whether there is a valid platform independent work-around or we just have to put up with this unhappy situation.

Answer 1

Bugs:

• https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8185569
• https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8176835
• https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8222624

to work around it set a default font that supports bold in your css e.g.

.root{
    -fx-font-size: 14pt;
    -fx-font-family: "Arial";
}