An InputMethodHighlight is used to describe the highlight attributes of text being composed.

  An InputMethodHighlight is used to describe the highlight attributes of text being composed. The description can be at two levels: at the abstract level it specifies the conversion state and whether the text is selected; at the concrete level it specifies style attributes used to render the highlight. An InputMethodHighlight must provide the description at the abstract level; it may or may not provide the description at the concrete level. If no concrete style is provided, a renderer should use Toolkit.mapInputMethodHighlight(java.awt.im.InputMethodHighlight) to map to a concrete style.

The abstract description consists of three fields: selected, state, and variation. selected indicates whether the text range is the one that the input method is currently working on, for example, the segment for which conversion candidates are currently shown in a menu. state represents the conversion state. State values are defined by the input method framework and should be distinguished in all mappings from abstract to concrete styles. Currently defined state values are raw (unconverted) and converted. These state values are recommended for use before and after the main conversion step of text composition, say, before and after kana->kanji or pinyin->hanzi conversion. The variation field allows input methods to express additional information about the conversion results.

InputMethodHighlight instances are typically used as attribute values returned from AttributedCharacterIterator for the INPUT_METHOD_HIGHLIGHT attribute. They may be wrapped into Annotation instances to indicate separate text segments.