Thread: JTextPane add text from bottom upwards

Is there a way to have the text in a JTextPane start at the bottom of the pane and get shifted up the screen instead of down the screen when new text comes in?

I'm trying to create a chat room. I am using a JTextField to pass text into the JTextPane. Everything works as desired except that I can't find any documentation or method that starts adding text to the bottom of a JTextPane instead of the top. I want the most recent line to always be the bottom line.

Is this possible with JTextPane's? I've searched for hours for an answer to this and can't find the solution or figure out how to achieve this.

JTextArea has an insert() method that allows text to be added at the desired index. You could check the source code for the JTextArea insert() method and write something similar for JTextPane, or you could use a JTextArea.

After spending about 10 hours on this, I think I finally figured it out, and of course it was so simple.

I had to add a layout manager to the JTextPane. I used BorderLayout.SOUTH on the TextPane and viola, it was adding text to the bottom.

At first, I tried adding BorderLayout.SOUTH to the JScrollPane, but that threw an error (because it has its own special layout). Besides, I wanted the JScrollPane to have a BorderLayout.CENTER and a JTextField below it to have BorderLayout.SOUTH. So I had to create a Panel with only the TextPane inside it and apply the layout to the TextPane, like so...

panel.add(textPane, BorderLayout.SOUTH);

The only other minor issue was that now the background of the TextPane and Panel were different and as the text scrolled up the screen, you could see that they had slightly different color backgrounds (240,240,240) vs (255,255,255), so I had to set the background color of both to the same color.

In this example, I gave different background colors to the Panel and TextPane to make the background issue I mentioned above easier to see. If you take them out, you will notice the minor issue I was talking about. Of course, I will have them both the same color in my actual code.

import java.awt.*;  
import javax.swing.*;  
 
public class TextPaneBottom extends JFrame  
{  
    public TextPaneBottom()  
    {  
        JTextPane textPane = new JTextPane();  
        JPanel panel = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());  
 
        panel.setBackground(Color.red);
        textPane.setBackground(Color.yellow);
 
        panel.add(textPane, BorderLayout.SOUTH);  
        add(new JScrollPane(panel));  
    }  
 
    public static void main(String[] args)  
    {  
        TextPaneBottom frame = new TextPaneBottom();  
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);  
        frame.setSize(400,200);  
        frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);  
        frame.setVisible(true);  
    }  
}

I don't know why you're making this so hard. Why not use JTextArea and its append() method?

Because you can't use Stylized text in JTextArea.