Java coloring characters GUI

Question

I am making a GUI dictionary program and have an input of letters that need to be highlighted in each words that is display. I was wondering how to do this, it doesn't seem very hard to color my entire JTextArea, but coloring only certain characters seems to be a little more difficult. I have read about JTextPane where I can use styled fonts, but even that doesn't seem straightforward. I need to parse every dictionary word's character and then change that characters color.

Answer 1

Yes, you'd want to use JEditorPane or JTextPane to do this sort of thing. You can either use styles, as you've seen, or you could create the contents as HTML and display that, which would be a lot simpler, if less flexible.

The relevant section of the Java Tutorial starts here.