draw text in Android native activity

Question

Hell o all,

I made native activity and i want to draw some text. what is the easiest way to do this? can i do this by using openGL and if yes how?

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

The simplest way is to create texture with text and render it over (or not) scene. You can also create your own text engine, but it is more complicated.

Answer 2

You're going to need to write your own text renderer in OpenGL. If you have a finite list of strings it may be easier to just pre-prepare them all in a single texture, and render them as single quads per word, or else you could have an atlas of characters and have a single quad per character. Alternatively, you could leverage a library to render to draw the text into a buffer at runtime and then render this to a quad.

If none of this makes sense, I suggest you go do some basic OpenGL tutorials. Google is your friend. A very feature rich font library is FreeType: http://freetype.sourceforge.net/index2.html.

Answer 3

    @Override protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {    
    canvas.drawColor(0xffffffff);
    Paint p = new Paint();        
    p.setColor(Color.BLACK);
    p.setTextSize(25);
    int left = 100;
    int top = 200;
    // draws text beginning at pixel 100,200 
    canvas.drawText(" some text ", left, top, p);