Java Swing

Chapter 21. Styled Documents and JTextPane

In the previous chapter, we introduced the classes and interfaces used to represent textual models in Swing. In this chapter, we’ll see how the Swing text model is extended to provide a simple mechanism for working with text “styles,” greatly simplifying the process of creating a powerful text editor. Once we’ve defined these extensions to the text model, we’ll look at the JTextPane class and see how it takes advantage of this model. At the end of the chapter, we’ll look at a detailed example of a simple editor that shows the power of styles.

Style

If you’ve ever worked with a reasonably powerful word processor, you’re probably already familiar with the concept of a style. A style is basically just a collection of attributes that describes how something should look. For example, as I sit here writing this book, the text I’m entering into my word processor looks a certain way because of the paragraph style (Body) and character style (Default) I have selected. To produce the heading just before this paragraph, I could have typed “Style,” selected the text, changed the font to Bodoni BT, changed the font size to 18, and toggled on the italics button. Thankfully (believe me!), I didn’t have to do all that. All I had to do was click somewhere within the text and use a menu to select the HeadA style, which encapsulates all of the properties described above (not to mention more interesting things, like the fact that the next paragraph should be ...