Vertical JButton

Question

Hi!
I'm new here and I have a problem with creating vertical button with vertical text. Basically what I want to do is to rotate JButton (including text and icon) by 90 degrees. |'ve already found some solutions on this and other forums over the Internet but none of them satisfy my needs. Some of the implementations don't support differrent UI themes. I already tried overriding paintComponent from JButton and I tried to rotate it, but it only works if width and height is the same (because of the paint region). I also tried to code my custom ButtonUI, but I can't paint background gradient for Metal L&F. Can anyone post a good solution? What I would like to achieve is the same look of vertical buttons as those from NetBeans pannels (gui editor doesn't support drawing such buttons). Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;
import javax.swing.Action;
import javax.swing.Icon;
import javax.swing.JButton;
* @author Michal
public class VerticalButton extends JButton implements Cloneable {
    //<editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Clockwise">
    private boolean clockwise = false;
    /** Po směru hodinových ručiček? */
    public void setClockwise(boolean clockwise) {
        this.clockwise = clockwise;
    /** Po směru hodinových ručiček? */
    public boolean getClockwise() {
        return clockwise;
    /** Po směru hodinových ručiček? */
    public boolean isClockwise() {
        return clockwise;
    //</editor-fold>
    //<editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Constructors">
    public VerticalButton() {
    public VerticalButton(Action a) {
        super(a);
    public VerticalButton(Icon icon) {
        super(icon);
    public VerticalButton(String text) {
        super(text);
    public VerticalButton(String text, Icon icon) {
        super(text, icon);
    public VerticalButton(String text, boolean clockwise) {
        this(text);
        this.clockwise = clockwise;
    //</editor-fold>
    @Override
    public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
        return rotate(super.getPreferredSize());
    private Dimension rotate(Dimension d) {
        return new Dimension(d.height, d.width);
    @Override
    public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g.create();
        VerticalButton clone = clone();
        clone.setSize(rotate(this.getSize()));
        if (clockwise) {
            g2.rotate(Math.PI / 2.0);
            g2.translate(0, -getSize().width);
        } else {
            g2.translate(0, getSize().height);
            g2.rotate(-Math.PI / 2.0);
        clone.paintSuperComponent(g2);
        g2.dispose();
    public void paintSuperComponent(Graphics g) {
        super.paintComponent(g);
    @Override
    protected VerticalButton clone() {
        try {
            return (VerticalButton) super.clone();
        } catch (CloneNotSupportedException cloneNotSupportedException) {
            return null;