Calculating drawstring coordinates

I wish to program a 'Secret Passage' Game where a text is broken up into its individual words, which then have to be guessed by the user, successful guesses appearing in the appropriate place on a blank screen until the whole passage is reconstituted. This means I need to establish correct coordinates for drawstring for each single word and so far I have been unable to find out how this can be done in Java. (I implemented this in Delphi some years ago) Has anyone got an idea how to achieve this?