How to display bold text in only parts of JTextArea?

Question

Can I alter the text of a JTextArea to bold (append text) and then back to normal and will it only display the bold text in bold and the rest as normal?

Also can the contents of JTextArea be saved as an RTF document?

Answer 1

No. What you're looking for is JEditorPane

This supports HTML (3.2?) which will allow you to use <font> (and other older tags) to provide rich text.

JEditorPane textarea = new JEditorPane("text/html", "");
textarea.setText("Here is some <b>bold text</b>");

EDIT: According to the javadoc I referenced above, JEditorPane also supports limited RTF. Don't forget to change the MIME to text/rtf

Answer 2

 textArea.setFont(textArea.getFont().deriveFont(Font.BOLD, textArea.getFont().getSize()));

Answer 3

I believe you need a JTextPane or JEditorPane for that.