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I want to print Strings in JTextArea and align them properly. Its hard to explain so I will upload the screen shot of what I am trying to achieve.
So Strings printed in each line are printed from Paper object which has parameters (id, title, author, date, rank). The data is read from a text file and is stored in a LinkedList using loadPaper() function.
Then displayPapers() function is used to display content of the Paper object to the JTextArea. displayPapers() is listed below:
/** Print all Paper object present in the LinkedList paperList to textArea */
public void displayPapers(){
// clear textArea before displaying new content
displayTxtArea.setText("");
Paper currentPaper;
ListIterator<Paper> iter = paperList.listIterator();
while(iter.hasNext()){
currentPaper = iter.next();
String line = currentPaper.toString();
if("".equals(line)){
continue;
} // end if
String[] words = line.split(",");
displayTxtArea.append (" "
+ padString(words[0],30)
+ padString(words[1],30)
+ " "
+ padString(words[2],30)
+ " "
+ padString(words[3],30)
+ padString(words[4],30)
+ "\n");
System.out.println(words);
//displayTxtArea.append(currentPaper.toString());
} // end while
displayTxtArea.append(" Total " + noOfPapers + " entries!");
} // end showAllPaper
The padString() function adds spaces to the String so that all of them have same number of words. PadString() is listed below:
/** Add spaces to Strings so that all of the are of same number of characters
* @param str String to be padded
* @param n total number words String should be padded to
* @return str Padded string
*/
private String padString(String str, int n){
if(str.length() < n){
for(int j = str.length(); j < n; j++){
str += " ";
} // end for
} // end if
return str;
} // end padString
I have worked on this for a while but still cant get the solution. As you can notice the above picture not everything is perfectly aligned as intended.
How do I align them perfectly so that it looks nicer? Thanks.
600
Output will be aligned "properly" in your JTextArea only if you use a mono-spaced font. "Andale Mono 14" for example would do the trick.
Also, in order to make your life easier and avoid the padding hell, use String.format with it's syntax.
String format = "%1$5s %2$-40s %3$-20s";
String someLine;
while (whatEver...) {
...
someLine = String.format(format, aNum, aName, aDate);
jTextArea1.append(someLine + "\n");
}
Use a JTable instead (for what is apparently tabular information). See How To Use Tables for more details & working examples.
35
You may use HTML with swing component or use JEditorPane.
JLabel jt=new JLabel();
jt.setText("<html>
<table border='1'>
<tr><th>No</th><th>Name</th></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>Mr.A</td></tr></table></html>");
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