Copying from a JTextPane to Microsoft Word and preserving format

[bobt Thompson]

I figured out how, in code, to add color and fonts to my JTextPane.  But when I copied the text to a Microsoft Word document it only copied the text, not the formatting.  Is it possible to copy from a JTextPane to a Microsoft Word document or Outlook email with the colors and fonts preserved?  If so, how can this be accomplished?

Thanks in advance.

[Paul Clapham]

I don't see why not. You would have to go through the styled document and convert all of the text and styles that it contains to text and styles in MS Word format. There's an API from Apache POI which supports Word.

[bobt Thompson]

I got it to work using the RTFEditorKit.  I had to define my own copy to clipboard method.  Right now I have a button click event that calls this code.  If I want to implement Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V I'll have to override those keystrokes to call this code.  By default it just copies text.

Here is the code:

Clipboard clp = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard();
ByteArrayOutputStream ot = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
RTFEditorKit kit = new RTFEditorKit();
try {
    kit.write(ot, txtMain.getDocument(), 0, txtMain.getDocument().getLength());
    ot.flush();
    DataHandler dh = new DataHandler(ot.toByteArray(), kit.getContentType());
    clp.setContents(dh, null);
}
catch (IOException e1) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e1.printStackTrace();
}
catch (BadLocationException e1) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e1.printStackTrace();
}

[Paul Clapham]

Even better, if RTFEditorKit does what you need!

[Rob Camick]

What is the DataHandler?

I don't see that class in the JDK 11 API.

It would be nice if you included that class so others could use it.

[Paul Clapham]

The javax.activation classes were deprecated after Java 8 and it looks like you have to download the Java Activation Framework separately to get them.