Im just trying to display some unicode chess symbols in eclipse using java, however it just prints out the random rectangles, and unless chess pieces have taken a radical ch
Most likely the font does not have the glyphs you need. Try changing the font of the console.
I tried your code and it does work correctly on my Linux. Tried it from the bare shell and from Eclipse. This is not a Java problem but a console charset problem. You have to look into the encoding your console accepts and make sure it is UTF8. Eclipse shouldn't factor in that.
If you are using the Eclipse run configuration to run your code, you need to set the character encoding of the console dialog. You can do this (I'm checking Indigo, I am not certain about earlier versions) by bringing up Run Configurations, selecting the Java run command in question, clicking on the Common tab, and on the right there is a way to select the character encoding of the console (which much be UTF8 for your program to work).
I found this out by typing "encoding for console" in the search help dialog.
In Eclipse, click Run -> Run Config. -> Common Tab -> Encoding -> Other : UTF-8 : this fixed it here
I'm running Version: Helios Service Release 2, Build id: 20110218-091 On Windows 7.
You may like to try using command line too.
It's an issue with Eclipse's console. Please see this article, you need to edit eclipse.ini - http://paranoid-engineering.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-unicode-output-in-eclipse.html