Have a look at JWord or JRichTextEditor
JWord is a commercial swing rich text editor, with tables, paging and RTF/opendoc/XML support.
Also supports header/footer, multi-column layout, export HTML, SVG, WMF etc.
JRichTextEditor is an open source swing widget, that's quite ok for note taking. Supports images, a simple XML format for storage, export to PDF, HTML. Not as advanced as JWord, but open source.
Might help.
