[Java] Creating a left-hand margin for a JEditorPane text box

Question

Edit - in short, what I'm looking for is a reliable way to add a left margin to a JEditorPane (read on for the issues I'm having if you'd like).

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I am trying to style some text in a JEditorPane, and have been fairly successful. The only problem I'm facing is that it seems impossible to create a margin.

Basically, I've extended PlainView and overridden the drawUnselectedText method. For now I just have it coloring the text red and changing the font. I've also overridden the drawSelectedText method to color the text.

This works consistently, whether text is selected or not, regardless of cursor position etc. - as long as I don't have a margin set.

However if I set a margin for the JEditorPane, the JEditorPane only works most of the time. The only case where it doesn't work is when a selection is made starting at the left-most character of any line. In that case, the margin is simply ignored and the selected text appears to the far left of the JEditorPane.

I know this is a pretty specific issue that most other people probably haven't experienced, and I have found nothing on the net about this, but I'm hoping someone here will have a solution.

Any ideas? Even anything that would allow me to set a margin using some other method than what I'm doing would be extremely helpful.

Answer 1

I gave up on finding an elegant solution to this problem. Basically I created a hack which tests whether or not the conditions exist where the bug will occur (selection from left, etc), and if they do it adjusts the rendering of the text.

I really don't like hacks as they are often bad for portability and maintainability, but this seems to work, so I suppose I'll abstract it away and hope it doesn't break anything.

In any case, it's working which is the key point. I didn't receive any answers, but I'm sure there are some people who at least tried to think of something, so thanks :)

Btw - if someone can come up with an elegant solution I will still accept that instead of my own answer (I can't anyways for two days).

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Edit: This is one reason I like Java. Hacks are less likely to cause portability issues - even though this is related to rendering (it works through interaction with a Graphics object), it should still work on any OS.