This is probably not as drop-in-place as what you were after... but JTextPane supports rich text and HTML.
Its trivial to get it to display rtf or html, just set the encoding type before you fill it with content.
As for making the little "B" and "I" etc style-modifying buttons, well if it came down to it, in a pinch that wouldnt be very hard to make yourself.
Think JButtons with Icons set. Their listeners get JTextPane's current selection start and end index positions like this :
jpane.getSelectionStart() or jpane.getSelectionEnd()
and then insert opening and closing html/rtf tags at those locations.
Undo is easy too - maintain a simple stack of the string contents of the Jpanel, every time the user does an edit action, a simple history.push(jpane.getText()) would store the state, and the undo button would be as simple as jpane.setText(history.pop()).
I/you could make one with B, I & undo in around 30 min I reckon - other buttons like lists will take longer, but not much so.
