Chapter 23. Editor Panes and Editor Kits

Over the last four chapters we've covered just about all the classes and interfaces that make up the Swing text framework. In this chapter, we'll look at a class that ties everything together: EditorKit. An EditorKit pulls together the document model, document view, document editing actions, and document I/O strategy, serving as a central reference point for a given document type.

In addition to looking at EditorKit and its subclasses, this chapter introduces the TextAction class (an abstract extension of AbstractAction) and the many useful concrete action classes available as inner classes of the EditorKit subclasses. These actions include basic functions such as copying and pasting text as well as style-oriented tasks such as changing font characteristics.

Throughout the chapter, we build simple but powerful editors for working with increasingly complex content types, moving from plain text to styled text to HTML. Finally, we discuss the process for creating your own editor kit.