Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Styled Text Components

In Volume 1, we discussed the basic text component classes JTextField and JTextArea. Of course, these classes are very useful for obtaining text input from the user. Another useful class, JEditorPane, displays and edits text in HTML and RTF format. (RTF is the “rich text format” that is used by a number of Microsoft applications for document interchange. It is a poorly documented format that doesn't work well even between Microsoft's own applications. We do not cover the RTF capabilities in this book.)

Frankly, at this point, the JEditorPane is limited. The HTML renderer can display simple files, but it chokes at many complex pages that you typically find on the Web. The HTML editor is limited and unstable.

We think that ...