TAB key Navigation distance.....

Question

I want to control the space alloted in a JTextPane when pressing TAB key.
More precisly I need to define the tab length when I press the TAB key.
Any help is appriciated !
Thanks

Answer 1

Here is a working example that sets each of the first 10 tabs to represent 4 characters (the default is 8). This is applied to the entire document. Hope this helps.
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.text.*;
public class TestTextPane extends JFrame
     public TestTextPane()
          JPanel panel = new JPanel();
          setContentPane( panel );
          JTextPane textPane = new JTextPane();
          textPane.setFont( new Font("monospaced", Font.PLAIN, 12) );
          textPane.setText( "abcdefghijklmnop\n\tone\n\t\ttwo" );
          JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane( textPane );
          scrollPane.setPreferredSize( new Dimension( 200, 200 ) );
          panel.add( scrollPane );
          setTabs( textPane, 4 );
     public void setTabs( JTextPane textPane, int charactersPerTab)
          FontMetrics fm = textPane.getFontMetrics( textPane.getFont() );
          int charWidth = fm.charWidth( 'w' );
          int tabWidth = charWidth * charactersPerTab;
          TabStop[] tabs = new TabStop[10];
          for (int j = 0; j < tabs.length; j++)
               int tab = j + 1;
               tabs[j] = new TabStop( tab * tabWidth );
          TabSet tabSet = new TabSet(tabs);
          SimpleAttributeSet attributes = new SimpleAttributeSet();
          StyleConstants.setTabSet(attributes, tabSet);
          textPane.getStyledDocument().setParagraphAttributes(0, textPane.getDocument().getLength(), attributes, true);
     public static void main(String[] args)
          TestTextPane frame = new TestTextPane();
          frame.setDefaultCloseOperation( EXIT_ON_CLOSE );
          frame.pack();
          frame.setVisible(true);