What's StyleContext worth for?

Question

Hi all,
I learned hot to color a PlainDocument following
Timothy Prinzing's article Customizing a Text Editor
http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/text/editor_kit/index.html
For the time being, I'm using just one font, but various
colors, much like the code discussed in the article.
For simplicity, I store colors in an array and that's it.
However, I still have around a class that extends
StyleContext. I'm thinking I'll have to add a dialog
to customize colors before the code goes to production.
So the question is:
Is there any advantage in defining a set of styles
and then getting colors from them, rather than directly
define Color[]?
In facts, I had to store some attributes in the doc's
elements, then in the view class I know what they mean
and I color them accordingly. I had to derive directly
from BoxView, since many functions in WrappedPlainView
miss a "protected" qualification and hence are package-
private :-( I mention that to say that it is unlikely
that I will gain anything from existing rendering
functions that use styles, since they are buried inside
other view classes and cannot be easily plugged in.
So, I'm wandering if there is a gain in terms of
coding customization dialogs, saving preferences in
a file or anything along that line.
Please help! Any idea or further comment are appreciated.
TIA
Ale

Answer 1

Well I'm trying to set up some kind of report writer. I'm loading a CSS-file with StyleSheet.loadRules and then tried to use StyleContext
in a stack like fashion to resolve attributes when encountering tags:
<P><I><B> ...
So it seemed to me, extending StyleContext would be a good start.
I can push attributes for 'P', 'I' and 'B' on the stack (by
copying the styles from the StyleSheet into the StyleContext,
then resolving them in that order).
But the method "getFont ( style_from_top_of_stack )"
does not work at all. It just returns some default values ?!?
Should that be the idea of StyleContext ???