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Answer 1

+2 A:

I'm not sure of this, but I think it's worth a try:

You can set a JLabel's text using HTML. This should take care of the font issue. Simply do something like

lbl.setText("<html><body>Foo bar baz</body></html>");

See how the text behaves then.

If that works for you, you can override JLabel's setText() method to convert \n into <br/> and wrap html and body tags around the text.

Carl Smotricz 2009-12-17 09:35:59

No need for <body> tag. Just having <html> is enough

eugener 2010-01-01 20:08:07

Answer 2

+3 A:

You can use JTextArea, a multi-line plain-text widget.

JavaDoc: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/swing/JTextArea.html

 JTextArea ta = new JTextArea("A JTextArea containing a long text");
 ta.setLineWrap(true);
 ta.setWrapStyleWord(true);
 ta.setOpaque(false);
 ta.setEditable(false);
 ta.setFocusable(false);

setLineWrap(true) enables the wrapping
setWrapStyleWord(true) changes wrapping from character- to word-based
setOpaque(true) renders it opaque, like a normal label
setEditable(false) hides the caret and disables the user to change the text
setFocusable(false) disables the user to select the text

It look like a nornal JLabel, but it will wrap the text, whenever the width is too small.

Sven Lilienthal 2009-12-17 10:08:04

At least in my case (Java 1.5 or Java 1.6), the line wrap does not behave as expected: it wraps the text at character level, not at word lebel. So in the above example, that could also produce something like "foo bar b(newline)az"

nd 2009-12-17 10:17:59

@nd: You need to call 'setWrapStyleWord(true)' in order to get word-level line wrap.

uckelman 2009-12-17 11:23:22

@uckleman: thanks, corrected the code

Sven Lilienthal 2009-12-17 12:45:46

Oh, totally overlooked the wrapStyleWord property in the documentation. Thank you.

nd 2009-12-17 14:10:52

If you have borders which are not completely opaque (e.g. a rounded border) you need to over-ride paintComponent() to prevent the background from painting in the insets area.

Justin 2010-06-30 21:11:49

Answer 3

+1 A:

I have made a custom UI delegate for JLabel to support multiple lines. It will wrap your text to fit the available space and also respect hard line breaks. The wrapped text should reflow when the component size changes. The UI delegate listens for changes to the component's dimension and recalculates the line breaks automatically.

Using the UI delegate is as straight forward as:

JLabel label = new JLabel("Text that'll wrap if necessary");
label.setUI(MultiLineLabelUI.labelUI);

Or alternatively use the custom MultiLineLabel class that in addition to wrapping text supports vertical and horizontal text alignment.

Here's the project (including a webstart demo): http://samuelsjoberg.com/archive/2009/10/multiline-labels-in-swing

If you try the demo, it should reflow fine on OS X. If I remember correctly there's some problem with reflowing upon resizing the frame on Windows. Didn't look in to it at the time, but it seemed that the resized event never propagated to the label.

Samuel Sjöberg 2009-12-17 12:44:39

Very nice, that is even better than I wished for (w/ shadows)

nd 2009-12-17 14:09:57

I can confirm there are problems on Windows, in my case I had to invoke `MLL.revalidate(); MLL.repaint();` in order to get long text to actually wrap without resizing the window. Problem seems to be that the MLL must be in a visible container before it works.

Justin 2010-06-29 17:53:43

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Reflowing label widget for Swing

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