I am trying to write a ListCellRenderer that gives me more explicit control
of the layout of the text than does extending JLabel.  I am not getting very
far.

In this particular case there are three columns of text to display in each
cell:

A single numeric digit row number
A three character spreadsheet column identifier, which is to be displayed
right-aligned in a 3-M wide space
A description of the contents of the column, which in all cells is to be
displayed at the same position (5 Ms in) in all cells of the list.

The only way I have been able to get this to work so far is by enclosing the
three bits of text inside appropriate HTML.  However, as is warned about in
the description of this capability, this is very slow.  So I would like to
draw the text myself in the ListCellRenderer.  However I find the
description in the documentation cryptic and everything that I try does not
work.  Figuring that java.awt.Label would give me some hints on how to paint
the text I browsed through its source, but it doesn't do the paint, and I
cannot for the life of me see how it does its job without that paint.  It
just puts the text value into a String object and then NEVER looks at it
that I can see.

One concern is that I cannot figure out how to let JList know how wide to
display the cells.  The minimum width of the Component I return from my
ListCellRenderer has to be wide enough to hold all of the text I am going to
write.  But according to the documentation, and experimentation, it is not
possible to get the instance of FontMetrics for the current Font until the
Component is already displayed!  Component.getFontMetrics blows up with a
NullPointerException because the hashtable of instances of FontMetrics has
not been initialized.  If I cannot get the FontMetrics instance then I
cannot calculate the minimum width of the cell.

I genuinely feel that the code for AWT and SWING is unnecessarily obscure in
its implementation.