paste special symbols in JTextField

[dharanikrm]

Hi,

I am unable to see the special symbols like greek character set when copied from character map of windows and pasted in the JTextField.

eg: when I copy alpha, beta symbols from character map and paste in text field they are displayed as a,b respectively instead of displaying their actual symbols

Regards,
Kumar

[JosAH]

I am unable to see the special symbols like greek character set when copied from character map of windows and pasted in the JTextField.

eg: when I copy alpha, beta symbols from character map and paste in text field they are displayed as a,b respectively instead of displaying their actual symbols

Can the font of your JTextField display those special characters? Try. e.g. the Arial MS Unicode font.

kind regards,

Jos

[dharanikrm]

Hi Jos,

I tried setting the font of the JTextField to Arial MS Unicode font, but invain.

Regards,
Kumar

[JosAH]

I tried setting the font of the JTextField to Arial MS Unicode font, but invain.

Does the copy/paste mechanism itself work? i.e. try to paste the text to something else that is capable of displaying the Greek characters and see what happens.

kind regards,

Jos

[Aeroren]

Maybe a stupid question, but are you actually copying 'alpha' and 'beta' characters (U+03B1 and U+03B2), or are you copying the 'a' and 'b' characters from the Symbol font?

(Hope this works)
Try: α β

[dharanikrm]

Hi Aeroren,

As I have mentioned in my first post, I am getting the problem when I am trying to copy the greek symbols from character map of windows (start->programs->accessories->system tools->character map) and paste in the text field in the swing application.In the other cases I guess it will work.

[Aeroren]

Yes, but are you copying the 'a' and 'b' from the Symbol font, or actually copying alpha and beta, which are a lot further down? The 'a' and 'b' from the Symbol font aren't actually an alpha and beta, Symbol simple draws the 'a' and 'b' that way. If you paste them in another window that uses a different font, they won't look like alpha an beta anymore.

But if you only wish to use Greek characters you can change the font of your textfield to Symbol.

[dharanikrm]

Hi Aeroren,

Thnx for your quick reply...I am copying the actual α ,β symbols that you can find in the character map of windows when you select symbols in the drop down list. I could see the actual symbols when I try to paste the same in text document but I am getting a,b when I say ctrl+v to paste the same in the text field

[Aeroren]

Now I'm kinda confused... :) Did you copy the alpha and beta characters in your post from mine or from the charmap?

Anyway, to be sure I created a simple JFrame with a JTextField in it and it accepts the alpha character as it should, without setting any parameters (i just used this.add(new JTextField()); ) The AWT version also works by the way.

Now, there might be different versions of the CharMap, but the one I'm using (Windows Vista) only has a dropdown list for font. If that's what you're using to change it to "Symbol" than that means you're not actually copying an alpha character but Symbol's representation of an 'a' (which happens to look like an alpha). If you paste this in a program like word, it will copy the font along and it will still look like an alpha. If, however, you copy the text to a field with another font (like notepad, this forum or your JTextField) it will look like an 'a'. In order to get the actual alpha character (UTF16 0x03B1) you need to select a font like Arial and scroll down about a third of the way. There you'll find the actual alpha and beta characters

[dharanikrm]

Thnx Aeroren, I think you are right and the explanation was pretty much clear. When I tried to copy the real alpha and beta characters by selecting the font Arial I could see them in my text field.