Question

I have JScrollPane with JTextArea inside it and I am trying to set the JTextArea’s orientation from right to left so the text inside it will start from the right and the scrollbar will be on the left

I’ve tried the following but they didn’t affect the direction of the orientation:

txt.applyComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
txt.setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
txt.setAlignmentX(JTextArea.RIGHT_ALIGNMENT);

EDIT:

the two answers camickr & trashgod provided work fine but not in my program where I use my JTextArea as an object Message and pass it to OptionPane.

EDIT2:

I figured out that setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT); doesn’t work if I apply it on the JOptionPane contents .. is there an alternative solution to this issue?

Similar to my code:

import java.awt.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class TextArea extends JPanel
{
    private JTextArea txt = new JTextArea();
    public TextArea()
    {
        setLayout(new GridLayout());
        txt.setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
        JScrollPane scroll = new JScrollPane(txt);
        scroll.setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
        setPreferredSize(new Dimension(200,200));
        this.add(scroll);
    }
    private void display()
    {
        Object[] options = {this};
        JOptionPane pane = new JOptionPane();
        int option = pane.showOptionDialog(null, null, "Title", JOptionPane.DEFAULT_OPTION, JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE, null, options, options[0]);
    }
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        new TextArea().display();
    }
}

Answer 1

and the scrollbar will be on the left

scrollPane.setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);

so the text inside it will start from the right

textArea.setComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);

The text starts on the right side, but still gets append to the end as you type instead of being inserted at the beginning of the line.

Update:

I don’t know why it doesn’t work in an option pane. Here is a simple solution:

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.event.*;

public class Test
{
    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception
    {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                JTextArea textArea = new JTextArea(4, 20);
                JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane( textArea );
                JPanel panel = new JPanel();
                panel.add( scrollPane );

                scrollPane.addAncestorListener( new AncestorListener()
                {
                    public void ancestorAdded(AncestorEvent e)
                    {
                        JScrollPane scrollPane = (JScrollPane)e.getComponent();
                        scrollPane.applyComponentOrientation(ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
                    }

                    public void ancestorMoved(AncestorEvent e) {}
                    public void ancestorRemoved(AncestorEvent e) {}
                });

                JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, panel);
            }
        });
    }
}