As you write more sophisticated programs, you may find the need to display textual or numeric information on the screen. Sofia supports adding text using the TextShape class in the package sofia.graphics.

You can think of a TextShape object as being similar to an actor, but one that is visually represented on the screen as a single line of text rather than an image. TextShape objects are added to the world just like actors, and they can be positioned and rotated the same way.

The primary difference between a TextShape and an Actoris that the TextShape class comes from Sofia's general-purpose 2D drawing library (which goes well beyond Actor/World micro-world classes), and uses a floating point coordinate system instead of an integer-based one. As a result, you use setX()/setY()/setLocation() and getX()/getY() methods, all of which use float values, instead of using the integer-based methods available in the Actor class (setGridX(), setGridY(), setGridLocation(), getGridX(), and getGridY()).

When you position a text shape, you specify the grid cell location where the text should appear. By default, the text is centered at the specified location (ask on Piazza if you want to use a different alignment strategy). Here is a simple example:

import sofia.graphics.*;  // To access TextShape and Color classes


// ... inside some method within a World class, for example ...
TextShape text = new TextShape("Hello World!");

this.add(text, 5, 5);  // Add text to this world at the given position

// ... change the size of the text, in points (can be an int or float)
text.setTypeSize(25);

// ... change the color of the text
text.setColor(Color.black);
//... use Hex color codes
text.setColor(Color.rgb(0xff, 0xaa, 0x88));

// ... change the font (uses android.graphics.Typeface class)
text.setTypeface(Typeface.create("times new roman", Typeface.BOLD));

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