Question

I’m trying to provide a progress report for a slow operation, in the form of text scrolling up from the bottom of the screen with details on what’s going on – it’s an effect you may have seen a few times in video games when they’re loading maps, making network connections and suchlike.

Glass pane seems to be the way to get the text overlay, that much I have working. My problem is exactly what component to use for the actual text display.

JTextArea can display text, but as far as I can see, it can only do it from the top of the screen down – is there a way to make it scroll text up from the bottom of the screen?

JLabel by contrast can align the first line of text to the bottom of the screen, and even take appended text on that line, but when I add more lines separated by newline characters, it just seems to swallow them up even after calling repaint and validate. Is there a way to make it scroll up with the new text?

Or is there another component I should be using instead?

Answer 1

JLabel would be the easiest. Otherwise you will have to override paintComponent to do anything fancy like animating the text movement.