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Sunday, February 1, 2015

Android beginner tutorial Part 11 TextView customization

In this tutorial we continue learning about the TextView class.

As I said in the previous tutorial, the class has multiple methods and attributes. Besides android:text attribute, there are a few other that are considered one of the most commonly set attributes. These are android:textSize, android:textStyle and android:textColor.

The android:textSize attribute sets the size of the displayed text. The possible units of measurement here are:

px - pixels
dp - density-independent pixels
sp - scale-independent pixels
in - inches
pt - points (1/72 of an inch)
mm - millimeters

Usually the "sp" unit is used, which displays fonts more correctly.

Example:

android:textSize="32sp";

The next attribute, android:textStyle, sets the style of the text and has 3 possible values - normal, bold and italic.

Example:

android:textStyle="bold";

The android:textColor attribute sets the color of your text. It has 4 possible value formats:

#RGB
#ARGB
#RRGGBB
#AARRGGBB

Where R - red, G - green, B - blue, A - alpha channel. The alpha channel value ranges from 0 to 1.

Now lets create a simple example, which displays the same text in 3 different TextViews.

Open our test Android project, go to res/values/strings.xml file and edit it to add a string that holds a "Hello world!" text, with an id "helloText":

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>

    <string name="app_name">Code For Food Test</string>
    <string name="helloText">Hello world!</string>
    <string name="menu_settings">Settings</string>

</resources>

Now go to activity_main.xml in res/layout/ to add 3 TextViews to the Activity:

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    tools:context=".MainActivity" >

    <TextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:text="@string/helloText" 
        android:textSize="48sp"/>
    
    <TextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:text="@string/helloText" 
        android:textSize="32sp"
        android:textStyle="italic"/>
    
    <TextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:text="@string/helloText" 
        android:textSize="32sp"
        android:textStyle="bold"
        android:textColor="#f00"
        />

</LinearLayout>

The results:

Thats all for today.

Thanks for reading!