Java Swing

Chapter 19. Text 101

Swing provides an extensive collection of classes for working with text in user interfaces. In fact, there’s so much provided for working with text, Swing’s creators placed most of it into its own package: javax.swing.text . This package’s dozens of interfaces and classes (plus the five concrete component classes in javax.swing) provide a rich (and complex!) set of text-based models and components. Over the course of the next six chapters, we’ll cover each of these classes and interfaces in detail. Figure 19.1 shows a very high-level view of the structure of the Swing text components. The arrows in the figure can be read as “knows about,” or “uses.”

Figure 19-1. High-level view of the Swing text framework

The text content for any component is stored in a model object called a Document. Chapter 20, and Chapter 21, cover the complex Swing document model in considerable detail. This model allows you to represent highly structured text supporting multiple fonts and colors, and even embedded Icons and Components.

Swing text components allow you to customize certain aspects of the look-and-feel without much work. This includes the creation of custom carets (cursor) and custom highlighting, as well as the definition of custom key bindings, allowing you to associate Actions with special key combinations. These features are covered in Chapter 22.

As usual, each text component ...