ordering image and text in jbutton

Question

I am attempting to overlay the text on a JButton over an ImageIcon that is behind it. However, when the imageIcon is added, the text dissapears. Is there any way to specify the

Answer 1

First of all, I see you're calling this method: boardArray[x][y].setLocation(locationX, locationY);

.setLocation(...) indicates you're using a null layout, please read Null layout is evil and Why is it frowned upon to use a null layout in Swing? to know why you should avoid its use.

For creating a Chess board, I'd be using GridLayout, please read how to use the different layout managers

Now, to overlay text over the icon, you only need to call JButton#setHorizontalAlignment(...) method and pass SwingConstants.CENTER as the parameter.

For example:

import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Font;
import java.io.IOException;

import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import javax.swing.Icon;
import javax.swing.ImageIcon;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.SwingConstants;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;

public class ButtonWithImageAndText {
    private JFrame frame;
    private JButton button;
    private Icon icon;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(() -> new ButtonWithImageAndText().createAndShowGui());
    }

    private void createAndShowGui() {
        frame = new JFrame(getClass().getSimpleName());
        try {
            icon = new ImageIcon(ImageIO.read(getClass().getResource("up.jpg")));
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        button = new JButton();

        button.setIcon(icon);

        button.setText("Click me!");
        button.setHorizontalTextPosition(SwingConstants.CENTER);
        button.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.PLAIN, 40));
        button.setForeground(Color.RED);

        frame.add(button);
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}

Which gives the following output:

For your future questions, please read how to make a valid Minimal, Complete and Verifiable Example (MCVE) that demonstrates your issue and your best try to solve it yourself, the code I posted is a good example of it, as you can copy-paste it and see the same result as I

Answer 2

Use the setComponentZOrder(...) method of the Container class. This will enable you to set the Z-index of the components to set them in what ever order you like. Look also this