Graphical User Interfaces - Building Java Programs: A Back to Basics Approach - page 854

In a larger GUI example, an event listener might examine the text that is written in
a text area by calling its getText method or set new text in the text area by calling its
setText method.
Currently, when the user types too much text to fit in the text area, the text disap-
pears off the bottom of the text box:
To fix this problem, we can make the text area scrollable by adding familiar navi-
gation components called scrollbars to it. Scrollbars are represented by instances of a
special container component called a JScrollPane . To make a component scrolla-
ble, create a JScrollPane , add the component to the scroll pane, and then add the
scroll pane to the overall frame. You construct a JScrollPane object by passing the
relevant component as a parameter:
// use scrollbars on this text area
frame.add(new JScrollPane(area));
We add the JScrollPane instead of the JTextArea to the frame, and the scroll
pane creates scrollbars along the right and bottom edges of the text area when the text
that the user enters is too large to display:
The appearance of onscreen text is determined by fonts, which are sets of descrip-
tions for how to display text characters. If you don't like the default font of the text
area, remember that every component has a font property that you can set. As we