Java Swing

Chapter 23. Text Views

In the previous chapter, we looked at three easy ways to customize the look-and-feel of Swing text components without having to write a custom L&F. In this chapter, we’ll see how the different text components are displayed by looking at the different text View classes.

This chapter probably deserves a bit of a disclaimer. The information provided here will not be of much importance to many Swing programmers. Unless you are planning to create your own types of document content that can’t be displayed using the existing components and views, you probably won’t need to understand the details of the classes described here. However, if you are considering creating your own text components with custom Element types, you should have at least a basic understanding of the different view classes, so you’ll know which ones to create when you implement your EditorKit.

In any case, it’s a good idea to read the introduction if you have any interest at all in how the text components get displayed.

Text Views

Much of the work of drawing the actual content of a text component (the text, or whatever else it displays) is done by various View classes. By installing your own EditorKit (discussed in detail in Chapter 24), you can control which View objects are created to render the Elements that make up the display without writing your own L&F. That is why we will be covering the complete View hierarchy in this section (unlike most of the UI classes, which we have not been covering ...