Example. For the text "Lights Tool" the metal JTextArea gives a
preferredSize of "126 x 21" and on Motif (which looks correct
it is "90 x 21".

---------------------------------------------
I was initally fooled by this description, so I'm going to add more here.

Here is an ASCII representation of the problem

Motif:

---------------
| Lights Tool |
---------------

Metal:

-----------------------------
| Lights Tool |
-----------------------------

This is with Swing-1.0.2. The problem however is not limited to Metal or Motif. It happens that Motif uses Monospaced as it's font, but Metal uses SansSerif. I experimented with other fonts and it seems to only get the right answer with Monospaced. Dialog font returns strange answers as well.

Here is a sample program I wrote to demonstrate the problem.


import com.sun.java.swing.*;
import com.sun.java.swing.border.*;

import java.awt.*;

class Scratch {

   public static void main(String[] args) {
      try {
         UIManager.setLookAndFeel("com.sun.java.swing.plaf.motif.MotifLookAndFeel");
         System.out.println("set motif");
      } catch (Exception e) {

         System.out.println(e);
      }
      JTextArea area = new JTextArea();
      area.setBorder(new LineBorder(Color.black));
      area.setText("Lights Tool");
      area.setFont(new Font("Dialog", Font.PLAIN, 12));
      System.out.println(area.getPreferredSize());
      System.out.println(area.getFont());

      JFrame f = new JFrame();
      f.getContentPane().add(area);
      f.getContentPane().setLayout(new FlowLayout());
      f.pack();
      f.show();
   }

}

When you run it, you will see that the TextArea stays about 2x as wide as it needs to be.


steve.wilson@eng 1998-05-20