How can I shift a piece of text from the centre of the screen to the right by a certain number of pixels?

I have a piece of text in the centre of the screen (a + symbol) and would like duplicate it but shift it to the right by a number of pixels so that I have two + symbols next to each other (they need to be an exact distance apart), but I don't know how to.

The code below is what I have that makes it go into the centre of the screen

Screen('TextSize', windowPtr, 50);

DrawFormattedText(windowPtr, '+', 'center', 'center', [0 0 0]);

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[Benjamin Thompson]

Neither of those two functions are part of MATLAB. What are their definitions?

[Walter Roberson]

Those are part of Psychtoolbox, which has separate support mechanisms

Answer 1

[Ishu]

Hi Joshua,

I understand that you are tring to plot two "+" signs, one in the centre of the screen and other shifted right by some distance. And I assume that these symbols you want to plot on a figure window.

You can use "figure" and "text" function of MATLAB to plot such texts.

symbol = '+';
distance = 20; % shift distance in pixels

% Create a figure
figure;

% Plot the first symbol at the center
text(0, 0, symbol, 'HorizontalAlignment', 'center', 'VerticalAlignment', 'middle', 'FontSize', 20);

% Plot the second symbol shifted to the right
text(distance, 0, symbol, 'HorizontalAlignment', 'center', 'VerticalAlignment', 'middle', 'FontSize', 20); % Example font size

% Set the axis limits to ensure both symbols are visible
xlim([-distance, distance]);

% Set the aspect ratio to ensure equal scaling in both x and y directions
axis equal;

To hide the axis ticks and labels use can add "axis off" in the code provided.

For more information you can refer these documentations:

axis: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/axis.html?searchHighlight=axis&s_tid=srchtitle_support_results_1_axis

figure: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/figure.html

text: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/text.html?searchHighlight=text&s_tid=srchtitle_support_results_1_text

Hope it helps.