I just finished to polish my "Score" output and was not very pleased about the text positioning weirdness so far :(

Well... Here some code I just found to work perfectly for updating text in a left aligned manner without using all the overhead ui.newLable() introduces.

I am sure the same technique works for right alignment and centering with little modification!

Here an example:

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function Foo:updateScore()
        local txt="Score: "..self.current_score
        if self.scoreview then
                local x=self.scoreview.x
                self.scoreview.text=txt
                self.scoreview:setReferencePoint(display.TopLeftReferencePoint)
                self.scoreview.x=x
        else
                self.scoreview = display.newText(txt, 10, 30, nil, 18 )
                self.scoreview:setTextColor( 255,255,255 )
                self.scoreview:setReferencePoint(display.TopLeftReferencePoint)
        end
end

You will notice those "strange" calls to setReferencePoint() ... this is the "trick". Without those you will not get consistent placement!

P.S.: Actually I think it is a bug that the ReferencePoint is changing at the assignment to the obj.text attribute!