Why do you care about the document length? If you are only intended to
capture or react to the first key pressed, that has nothing to do with the
document length as far as I can see. You should only need to monitor your
KeyListener increment a counter for each key pressed; then ignore everything
but the first key press (or disable the listener altogether after the first
key press.) Right?

--
Rhino

Why would you *care* how long the document is? The problem as you
describe it, is independent of document size. All you want to know is
whether its the first key pressed or not.

Sounds like a "first keystroke" boolean in your KeyListener is the
correct solution.

I suppose you'd give the KeyListener access to the Document, perhaps by
passing it as a parameter to the constructor.