What I discovered after a conversation with a jaspersoft engineer is that the iReport and JasperReports is very sensitive to the fonts that you use. I created my own font with fontographer by starting with a standard font, stripping out all the characters I don't need and creating a new font. Depending on the font settings of the original font, (the bounding box and interrnal size) it may not work properly. I examined fonts that did work and matched the settings, specifically the UPM square. (Font Information => Demensions) Set to 2048 and recalculate the font line spacing, etc with the "Calc all" button. After reimporting this newly sized font, this fixed my font issue.