having trouble getting JButtons to display their text?

[Louis Lewis]

Hello, I am in the middle of creating a chess application, and am currently working on laying out a list of moves on the right of the actual board. Specifically, I want to have a JLabel that says "moves" on top of a JList that contains the moves, on top of two buttons, labeled "<" and ">" respectively, to which I will eventually add functionality to take back and un-take back moves. Currently I have the first two parts down, but when I add my buttons,the other components are getting messed up. I have all of these things in a vertical BoxLayout inside of a JPanel with a fixed width of 70, and a height that varies according to the size of the window (I overrode the getPreferredSize method of the JPanel). The two buttons are within their own JPanel with a grid layout with one row and two columns. Then I basically just add the moves list label, the movesList, and the panel housing the buttons to the larger panel, in that order. However, I am encountering two problems. One, the buttons display the text "... " instead of "<" and ">" as if there is not enough room, although I'm pretty sure three periods take up more space than one less than or more than sign. The next is that, without the buttons at the bottom, the label reading "moves" is appropriately centered (or left aligned, I can't tell which) over the movesList, and you can read its whole text. However, when I add in the buttons at the bottom, the label of the top shifts over to the right and then reads "mov..." because it has run out of room.

I am really stumped as to how to solve either or both of these problems, anyone have any ideas?

Here is my code:

//move list
movesListLabel = new JLabel("Moves");
//the components for the actual movesList come from another class with an object called pen, but I don't think this is the problem
listModel = pen.getListModel();
JList movesList = pen.getMovesList();
JScrollPane listScroller = pen.getMovesListScrollPane();
//forward and back buttons
moveButtonHousing = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,2));
moveButtonHousing.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(70,35));
back = new JButton("<");
forward = new JButton(">");
moveButtonHousing.add(back);
moveButtonHousing.add(forward);
//set layout within the movesListHousing
movesListHousing = new JPanel()
{
//same height as chessboard, but only 70 pixels wide
    @Override
    public final Dimension getPreferredSize() 
    {
        Dimension d = super.getPreferredSize();
        Dimension prefSize = null;
        Component c = getParent();
        if (c == null) 
        {
            prefSize = new Dimension(
                    (int)d.getWidth(),(int)d.getHeight());
        } else if (c!=null &&
                c.getWidth()>d.getWidth() &&
                c.getHeight()>d.getHeight()
                ) 
        {
            prefSize = c.getSize();
        } else {
            prefSize = d;
        }
        int w = (int) prefSize.getWidth()-100;
        int h = (int) prefSize.getHeight()-15;
        // the smaller of the two sizes
        int s = (w>h ? h : w);
        return new Dimension(70,s);
    }
};
movesListHousing.setLayout(new BoxLayout(movesListHousing,BoxLayout.Y_AXIS));
movesListHousing.add(movesListLabel);
//movesListHousing.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.black));
movesListHousing.add(listScroller);
movesListHousing.add(moveButtonHousing);

[Piet Souris]

First: try out your 'moveButtonHousing' in a separate frame,
just to see if the layout is correct. That would only take a couple of lines of code.
Then print out the width of that panel.

Then, I suggest that you print out the value of s, in line 40 and a half, just to see
what this complicated calculation leads up to. Compare it to the width of above.

We might get a hint of what's going on.

Greetz,
Piet