Develop Reference

Dynamical Font-size in TextArea - JavaFX

I am currently trying to get into JavaFx and started writing a program similar to Microsoft Word or Pages on OS X. I had to realize that the TextArea is really limited when it comes to style, so I was wondering if there is a component that is editable (as in you can write on it) and is able to change font size/color dynamically (size and color are defined with a choicebox on the UI.
I read a little but about binding style-types or setting css rules, but as far as I know there is no way to access Java components (choicebox) or even variables from the css style sheet, so it wouldn't be dynamical.
What I mean by dynamically change font size/color:
Type a character into the TextArea.
Double the font size.
Type another character, that now appears twice as big as the first one, that is still displayed in its original size.
I'm having a hard time explaining myself, if you have any questions, please ask and I'll try going into further detail. Thanks
EDIT: Something that might be important is the fact that I am using Scene builder to create my UI.
EDIT 2: Could I cheat my way around it using a Highlighter with the same color as my background?

Eclipse Plugin - TreeViewer display large amount of Text

I am currently writing on a Plugin that uses a view with a TreeViewer. The thing is, as content for my Nodes I get plain HTML. I would like to display the HTML styled or, if not possible, the simple plain text without any HTML. But the issue I run into is that the TreeViewer is not displaying enough text.
As you can see the HTML is not completly displayed and that everyting is only one line is not pretty aswell. I would like to have a box or something that can display the text (doesnt matter if the box does not support the HTML-styling, I can do this from hand).
Currently I'm using a LabelProvider that is returning the Text of a Node as string (and from what I can see this is the only possible Option with a LabelProvider).
As workaround I could only think of cutting the text into serval nodes but I would like to know if there are better options out there ;)

If it's your own LabelProvider, you can truncate or manipulate the text shown however you wish. Since it ultimately ends up as a native control, you're basically stuck with text label with a single image (plus whatever IColorLabelProvider offers) as long as you're using a tree control.
You could experiment with the Figures from the GEF project or the Nebula CompositeTable as alternatives.

you can use a editor to show the content, this would be appropriate with your requirement. View can also be think for it. tableviewer clould also be least choice. TreeViewer generaly use to deal with hierarchical data.

There are several label providers available in Eclipse in the org.eclipse.jface.viewers package. You can choose to implement your own or extend one of them to choose your need.
Looking at the image, I would recommend to display only few words in the tree and the entire content of the node could be in a different pane/tool tip.

Printing data to a pre printed form/stationery

We have a requirement where we already have pre printed stationery and want user to put data in a HTML form and be able to print data on that form. Alignment/text size etc are very important since the pre-printed stationery already has boxes for each character. What could be a good way to achieve this in java? I have thinking of using jasper reports. Any other options? May be overlay image with text or something?
Also we might need to capability to print on plain paper in which case the boxes needs to be printed by our application and the form should match after the printed with the already printed blank stationery containing data.
Do we have some open source framework to do such stuff?

Jaspersoft reports -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports/
You will then create XML templates, then you will be able to produce a report in PDF, HTML, CSV, XLS, TXT, RTF, and more. It has all the necessary options to customize the report. Used it before and recommend it.
You will create the templates with iReport then write the code for the engine to pass the data in different possible ways.
check http://www.jaspersoft.com/jasperreports
Edit:
You can have background images and overlay the boxes over it and set a limit on the max character size ... and many more
It is very powerful and gives you plenty of options
Here is one of iReport's tutorial for a background image http://ireport-tutorial.blogspot.com/2008/12/background-image-in-ireport.html

The big problem when printing form content that has been filled in electronically, is aligning it correctly on the pre-printed form. You may get content to align for one printer, but when you use another it is completely misaligned.
Fly Software have a form design product called InForm Designer that gets around the problem nicely by allowing users to specify and save vertical and horizontal offsets for printers. This ensures filled in form content is always aligned. I've tried it and it works perfectly. Take a look for yourself here...
http://www.flysoftware.com/products/inform_designer/overview.asp
It might be worth implementing a printer offset similar to InForm's in your own application (if possible).

Some things to think about.
First in terms of the web page, do you want use the stationery as the form layout?
Does it have to be exact?
Combed boxes (one for each character)
Do you want to show it like that on the web page, or deal with the combing later.
How are you going to deal with say a combed 6 digit number. Is this right aligned. What if they enter 7 digits. Same for text. what if it won't fit.
Font choices, we had a lot of fun with W...
How aligned do you want the character within the box, what font limitations does that imply, some of the auto magic software we looked at did crap like change the size of each character.
Combed editing is a nightmare, we display combed, but raise an edit surface the size of the full box on selection.
Another thing that might drive you barking mad, you find find small differences in the size and layout of the boxes, so they look okay from a distance but a column of boxes sort of shifts about by a pixel. Some of testing guys had to lend us their electron microscopes, so we could see how many ink molecules we were out by. :(
Expect to spend a lot of time in the UI side of things, and remember printed stationery changes, so giving yourself some sort of meta description of the form to start with will save you loads of trouble later on.

Code/text folding in SWING

I'm looking for a way to provide 'text folding' capabilities to a swing JTextArea or JTextPane
More specifically, I want to add a block of data in a text component and I want the component to display only some header line. Then the user can unfold the block by clicking some icon. This is just like the code folding feature in most IDE.
I've found ->some sample code<- after some thorough search, but the mechanisms used here are quite obscure to me and it stops working when I try to remove text from the document.
Maybe using XML as input could be a lead ?

This one how to add collapsible area
http://java-sl.com/collapse_area.html
This one how to represent XML
http://java-sl.com/xml_editor_kit.html

I would start by looking at the NetBeans API: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-editor-fold/overview-summary.html
If you were to do it yourself, you'd need to provide a Document implementation that makes the JTextComponent think that pieces are being added or removed, then attach click events that tell the document to update itself. A lot of work.
Visually, it may also be better to use JEditorPane, but that's probably more work.

Looking for an efficient Java Swing based console

I'm looking for a highly efficient Swing Java component which I can just plug into my application UI. I already tried using the classes within Swing such as JTextArea with no avail; they simply aren't high-performance enough and have any crippling drawbacks. Additionally, it'd be nice if it had standard console features such as scroll-lock, clear console, colours, and so on.
Edit: Forgot to say, this console will have a lot of debug information streaming into it, and it needs to be fully scrollable.
Cheers,
Chris

I fail to see what is wrong with using a JTextPane. It supports attributes which you can specify as each piece of text is added to the console. Clearing it is also obviously a no brainer. When added to a scroll pane it also supports scrolling.
You can add scroll locking by using Smart Scrolling.
Plus, it removes text too early and
No idea what that means as text is never removed unless you specifically remove it from the document.
doesn't allow the user to scroll while
input is being entered (afaik). The
effect is that you just see text
flashing while the number of rows
remains the same.
By default the text scrolls automatically as text is append to the document assuming the code is executed on the EDT. This scrolling can be controlled the the example provided in the link above.
Edit:
but I'd still like a library solution
I don't know of any
auto-colourise text coming from
different streams
The Message Console might give you some ideas.
(i.e., detect [error] prefix on a
line) and colourise lines based on
this)
This is easily done by adding a DocumentFilter to the Document of the text pane. You can add attributes as text is inserted into the Document.

Be sure that you read about the Event Dispatching Thread (EDT) in swing!
BTW: a simple search 'java swing console' will give you a lots of hints OR you could use/adapt the beanshell textfield which is a jtextfield too ...