In my Java app I am trying to create a very simple form with a label and a set of controls on each row of the form. Imagine something like this crude ASCII diagram:
Result 1: (*) pass ( ) fail
Result 2: ( ) pass (*) fail
Error Count: [10______]
Explanation: [Operator overload___]
Annoyingly the JRadioButtons don't line up with the rest of the controls as they have a large amount of padding all around, pushing them to the right a couple of pixels and adding a lot of space between lines. I end up with something like this:
Result 1: (*) pass ( ) fail
Result 2: ( ) pass (*) fail
Error Count: [10______]
Explanation: [Operator overload___]
How can I get the radio buttons to stop having so much empty space so they can line up nicely with everything else? If it matters this is using the GTK L&F; I haven't tried running the program under Windows.
It looks like there are two culprits:
The mini-JPanel containing the two radio buttons has a FlowLayout which defaults to adding 5 pixels of padding around each component.
Doing radioButton.setBorder(null) eliminates another pixel's worth of space around the buttons. It also screws up the dotted line drawn around them when they have focus, though.
Use a GridBagLayout, and make sure to anchor cells (each label and checkbox would have its own cell) towards the left or towards the right as needed. The labels would be right-justified, the checkboxes would be left-justified.
Since customizing GridBagLayouts by hand is a hassle, I recommend using the NetBeans GUI builder and adjusting them using its graphical "customize" tool.
Another solution can be to change margin (radionbuttons's setMargin method). This should do the job. The only downside is that margins/insets will be different for different LAFs.
Related
If I make button relatively small, it's caption turns to ellipsis.
How to turn off this feature?
Don't let the button go below it's preferred size, then it will never need to elide the text of the button label:
button.setMinSize(Button.USE_PREF_SIZE, Button.USE_PREF_SIZE);
I want to make very small button
You can use any of the below either separately or in combination:
Apply CSS to use a very small font in the button.
Make the label text for the button very short.
Use brian's answer which proposes explicitly setting the ellipse string to empty.
Use a small graphic icon instead of text.
You can use setMinSize as documented above in all cases (if you wish the button not to go below a preferred size truncating or eliding content).
In all cases, if you wish, you can also apply CSS to minimize the padding between the label and button the border.
From your previous comment (I want to use simple captions like "<" and ">"), I think option 2 (Make the label text for the button very short) is what you want.
You may also be interested in Joel's Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives which would indicate, usability-wise that very small buttons are usually a pretty bad idea.
in your label/button you can use the textOverrun property to turn off ellipsis.
textOverrun.set(OverrunStyle.CLIP);
this is probably a bit late for you, so i am putting it here for lone wanderers digging up this question.
It puts ... because there's no room for the text. You can use bigger buttons or a smaller font but if you really want the dots gone use button.setEllipsisString(""); , but then you just get truncated text.
I am trying to arrange two set of buttons for a calculator GUI. Each one uses a GroupLayout to make them. One set is the numbers (and "."), the other is for operation buttons. This basically works but if one of the buttons has double length (for example the equals button on my operations set) it throws the other buttons out of line.
I will use the operations set as an example. There are two columns and four rows of buttons. The final row only has one button - the equals. I want to make this double length stretching across both columns. At the moment it simply pushes the second column along to the end of it when I want the second column to sit on top of it.
Here's the code for the layout - operLayout is the name of the layout for the operations, left and right brackets on the first row, + and - on the second, * and / on the third and equals on the last row. Each button has a minimumSize set elsewhere (they are all the same except equals is twice as long).
operLayout.setAutoCreateGaps(true);
operLayout.setAutoCreateContainerGaps(true);
operLayout.setVerticalGroup(operLayout
.createSequentialGroup()
.addGroup(
operLayout.createParallelGroup(GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE).addComponent(leftBracket)
.addComponent(rightBracket))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup().addComponent(add).addComponent(subtract))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup().addComponent(multiply).addComponent(divide))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup().addComponent(equals)));
operLayout.setHorizontalGroup(operLayout
.createSequentialGroup()
.addGroup(
operLayout.createParallelGroup().addComponent(leftBracket).addComponent(add)
.addComponent(multiply).addComponent(equals))
.addGroup(
operLayout.createParallelGroup().addComponent(rightBracket).addComponent(subtract)
.addComponent(divide)));
I understand why this is happening but I'm not sure how to sort it out. Is there a simple way? Or should I change the way I'm doing it? Thanks
Put the equals component in its own parallel horizontal group.
First of all, make sure you use consistent indentation when you're using GroupLayout. I have found this absolutely vital in keeping track of what's going on.
The reason you're seeing the behavior you report is because the equals sign is part of the same horizontal parallel group as the first column of buttons. So when you make it double wide, it pushes the second column of buttons to the right. This is exactly what you're telling it to do because you're telling it to stay in the first parallel group (column).
In order to get the behavior you want, you have to layout that button separately, in parallel to the other buttons. You do this by putting it in its own parallel group. You probably want to put an alignment on this group also in order to get the best behavior. I think GroupLayout.Alignment.CENTER is what you want.
Also note that you don't need to create a new group if it's only going to have one component in it. Just add that component instead.
operLayout.setVerticalGroup(operLayout.createSequentialGroup()
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup(GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE)
.addComponent(leftBracket)
.addComponent(rightBracket))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup()
.addComponent(add)
.addComponent(subtract))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup()
.addComponent(multiply)
.addComponent(divide))
.addComponent(equals));
operLayout.setHorizontalGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup()
.addGroup(operLayout.createSequentialGroup()
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup()
.addComponent(leftBracket)
.addComponent(add)
.addComponent(multiply))
.addGroup(operLayout.createParallelGroup()
.addComponent(rightBracket)
.addComponent(subtract)
.addComponent(divide)))
.addComponent(equals));
As above. I have a modal JOptionPane that uses a text area to display a slightly larger than normal message. The Pane works fine and is currently roughly 300px sq. The problem is I am trying to output something similar to the following:
Amt (TAB HERE) x (TAB HERE) Type (TAB HERE) Price (TAB HERE)
Again I have no problem with the actual Panel at all it's displaying at the size I want but for some reason it "tabs" really far. Like 1/3 of the JOptionPane such that it cuts off after Type and I lose half my text. Is there any way I can specify the size of the tab I want? I've tried aligning manually using spaces but as you can imagine not all letters are the same width and it's just too damn hard to get it to line up properly so I NEED to tab. I don't want to mess around with new layout managers either. I am simply concatonating a string in a method returning it to a JTextArea and then putting that inside my JOptionPane so I'd like a solution that works doing this. If I output to the command line the tab looks normal, like maybe 5 odd characters but doing that in this manner it's more like 2 words long....
Worse case scenario I make a bigger JOptionPane but I would prefer not to for aesthetics.
You can put an HTML table in your JTextArea like they show here. Either a JTextArea or a JTable can go in a JOptionPane.
They say a single image is worth 1000 words:
I'll just note that the size is set to default. (build in NetBeans)
any idea how do I fix this?
Adam.
Without you showing code, I'd say that your JTextField width is not set to be wide enough. You can resize it to be large enough for the number of characters you anticipate.
However, this does not guarantee that the user will not type in more characters, which would show the text cutoff as well.
You can extend the Document that JTextField uses to add the maximum character restriction, as shown at
http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0198.html
what are the lengths of your data,it seems you changed the layout and that's causing that problem as the border seems also occupying half of the character.
They say a single image is worth 1000
words:
Actually its not. When posting a question a SSCCE is worth 1000 words.
Stuff like that usually happens when you don't use a layout manager. Assuming (which is all we can do since you didn't post any code) that you are using a proper layout manager then your basic code for creating a text field to display 3 characters is:
JTextField width = new JTextField(3);
The reason is the LNF that was assigned to the frame, once I've changed that, it all works fine.
I have a JLabel that needs to display some html-formatted text. However, I want to restrict this to being 4 lines long (and if so, provide a button to see everything).
So far, I've tried setting the maximum size manually or via a layout manager. However, both of these solutions can cause part of a line to be displayed.
edit: To add a little more details, I need to force 4 lines even when respecting line wrapping correctly, resizing components, and changing font sizes. I've considered handling resize/fontsize changes by replacing the label with a new one that fits correctly.
JLabel seems to handle incomplete tags well, so I could probably do something like a binary search on the input string finding which character would cause it to go over the 4 line limit (using FontMetric to determine how many pixels 4 lines would be), and then replacing an existing label with the new one. The big downside to this approach is that I need to run the computation every time the user resizes the panel or changes fonts (and it feels like a dirty dirty hack).
Add the JLabel to a JScrollPane as set the scrollpane with a reasonable preferred size. Scrollbars will appear a necessary.
I don't know of any absolute solution to the questions since I doubt you can define what a "line" is. One line of text may be font 12 and another 24. I don't know of any way to calculate the height of each given line.
Even if you did use a ComponentListener to handle the componentResized() event I'm not sure you can come up with a reasonable algorithm to to calculate the exact width/height of of a 4 line display.
I would try running through the String of text and removing all text after the third "\n"
String shortenText(String oldtext){
String newText = "";
for(int i=0;i<3;i++){
newText += oldtext.substring(0,oldtext.indexOf("\n"));//adds one line to String
oldtext = oldtext.substring(indexOf("\n")+1);//shorten old string to prepare for next iteration
}
return newText;
}
You may also want to try the same algorithm, except strip of <p> and <br> tags as well...
If you know the values of the possible tags just switch the text from "\n" to "<br>" or any tag you need
Hey, I found a way that works. The framework I'm working with allows me to create a listener for font size changes. In this listener, I determine what the new max size of the label is (getFontMetrics(font).getHeight() * 4) and then re-set the maximum height on the label to this and then relayout everything. This even handles the word wrap case well. I'm guessing that someone could do nasty things with silly HTML input, but this covers the 99% case pretty well.