JTextArea : Java Glossary

2008-08-19 by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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JTextArea

multiline display of text on the screen. Sometimes you permit the user to edit it. You can control where the line breaks are by embedding '\n' characters in your text. The AWT equivalent is called a TextArea. AWT TextArea has an advantage over JTextArea. Without any coding, the user can select, copy and paste, even in an unsigned Applet. With Swing this does not work in Opera.

JTextAreas have use the same font size and colours throughout. If you want to vary them, you will need a JTextPane or a JTextEditorPane.

For a complex display, consider generating a page of HTML, XHTML or XML on the the fly, then rendering it, perhaps in an iframe, in a separate browser window, or a separate browser task. Then you can use elaborate CSS style sheets, rowspan and colspan tables. Verifying generated HTML is a snap.

On Mac OS X, I have heard reports you cannot copy/paste from a JTextArea when you do a setEditable( false ).

Learning More

Sun’s Javadoc on the JTextArea class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_14 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_19 on your local Windows J: drive.

Sun’s Javadoc on the Document class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_14 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_19 on your local Windows J: drive.

AWT
JEditorPane
JPasswordField
JTextField
JTextPane
Swing
TextArea
TextField
ToolTip
window differences

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