How to make JTextArea upside down in Java Swing

Question

I am creating a word search GUI using Swing for a club project. I want the answers "hidden" by making them upside down in the GUI. I've seen a post where a person put a negative Integer as font size but it was 9 years ago and it doesn't seem to work anymore, instead the text simply does not appear

 Font FontUpsideDown = new Font("Sans_Serif", Font.PLAIN,  -50);

 JTextArea upsideDown = new JTextArea("Hello");
 upsideDown.setFont(FontUpsideDown);
 upsideDown.setEditable(false);

    ...

 
 JPanel.add(upsideDown, gbc);

Answer 1

I've seen a post where a person put a negative Integer as font size but it was 9 years ago

If you are referring to this question then this answer , to that question, worked for me. Simply override method paintComponent of the relevant JComponent (which appears, from your question, to be JTextArea ). Below code demonstrates.

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.EventQueue;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;

public class Inverted {

    private static JScrollPane createTextArea() {
        JTextArea textArea = new JTextArea(10, 50) {
            protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
                Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g;
                g2.scale( -1.0, -1.0 );
                g2.translate( -getWidth(), -getHeight() );
                super.paintComponent(g2);
            }
        };
        textArea.append("Is this upside down?");
        JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane(textArea);
        return scrollPane;
    }

    private static void gui() {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame();
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        JLabel label = new JLabel("Inverted") {
            protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
                Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) g;
                g2.scale( -1.0, -1.0 );
                g2.translate( -getWidth(), -getHeight() );
                super.paintComponent(g2);
            }
        };
        JPanel inverted = new JPanel();
        inverted.add(label);
        frame.add(inverted, BorderLayout.PAGE_START);
        frame.add(createTextArea(), BorderLayout.CENTER);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setLocationByPlatform(true);
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(Inverted::gui);
    }
}

When I run the above code, using Java 19 on Windows 10, I get the following GUI: