Has anyone an idea how to display BitmapText with a background behind it? I could not figure out how to set the background color of the text directly und my first approach to but a very flat box right behind the BitmapText had a few display problems und of course did not resize when the text in the BitmapText changed. So maybe there is a much simpler solution than putting the BitmapText and an additional geometry together in a node? Or is there even an better way to display text in the 3d scene than using BitmapText?
You have to manage your own backgrounds. Or grab the Lemur UI library and use its Label class which has that built in already.
Ok thanks for the quick answer, I found your post http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/lemur-work-in-progress-posted/ quite promising, it looks exactly like what I was looking for so I will try the latest jar from https://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyplatform-contributions/source/browse/trunk/Lemur/release/ 
For anyone who ever might have a similar problem also read this post here: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/2013/04/the-herodex-gui-working-in-jme3/
btw: Shouldn’t BitmapText be set to deprecated and replaced by the Lemur Label class?
@simon.heinen said: Ok thanks for the quick answer, I found your post http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/lemur-work-in-progress-posted/ quite promising, it looks exactly like what I was looking for so I will try the latest jar from https://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyplatform-contributions/source/browse/trunk/Lemur/release/ ;)For anyone who ever might have a similar problem also read this post here: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/2013/04/the-herodex-gui-working-in-jme3/
btw: Shouldn’t BitmapText be set to deprecated and replaced by the Lemur Label class?
No. Because Label does more than just simple text… and in fact, Label uses BitmapText.
@pspeed said: No. Because Label does more than just simple text... and in fact, Label _uses_ BitmapText.
ok but in which scenarios would I still want to use BitmapText if I could also use Label?
@simon.heinen said: ok but in which scenarios would I still want to use BitmapText if I could also use Label?
Any time that all you want is text and/or don’t want to download a separate UI library just to put some plain text on the screen.