Example
A spannable TextView can be used in Android to highlight a particular portion of text with a different color, style, size, and/or click event in a single TextView widget.
Consider that you have defined a TextView as follows:
TextView textview=findViewById(R.id.textview);
Then you can apply different highlighting to it as shown below:
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Spannable color: In order to set a different color to some portion of text, a
ForegroundColorSpancan be used, as shown in the following example:Spannable spannable = new SpannableString(firstWord+lastWord); spannable.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(firstWordColor), 0, firstWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); spannable.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(lastWordColor), firstWord.length(), firstWord.length()+lastWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); textview.setText( spannable );Output created by the code above:
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Spannable font: In order to set a different font size to some portion of text, a
RelativeSizeSpancan be used, as shown in the following example:Spannable spannable = new SpannableString(firstWord+lastWord); spannable.setSpan(new RelativeSizeSpan(1.1f),0, firstWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); // set size spannable.setSpan(new RelativeSizeSpan(0.8f), firstWord.length(), firstWord.length() + lastWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); // set size textview.setText( spannable );Output created by the code above:
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Spannable typeface: In order to set a different font typeface to some portion of text, a custom
TypefaceSpancan be used, as shown in the following example:Spannable spannable = new SpannableString(firstWord+lastWord); spannable.setSpan( new CustomTypefaceSpan("SFUIText-Bold.otf",fontBold), 0, firstWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); spannable.setSpan( new CustomTypefaceSpan("SFUIText-Regular.otf",fontRegular), firstWord.length(), firstWord.length() + lastWord.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); text.setText( spannable );However, in order to make the above code working, the class
CustomTypefaceSpanhas to be derived from the classTypefaceSpan. This can be done as follows:public class CustomTypefaceSpan extends TypefaceSpan { private final Typeface newType; public CustomTypefaceSpan(String family, Typeface type) { super(family); newType = type; } @Override public void updateDrawState(TextPaint ds) { applyCustomTypeFace(ds, newType); } @Override public void updateMeasureState(TextPaint paint) { applyCustomTypeFace(paint, newType); } private static void applyCustomTypeFace(Paint paint, Typeface tf) { int oldStyle; Typeface old = paint.getTypeface(); if (old == null) { oldStyle = 0; } else { oldStyle = old.getStyle(); } int fake = oldStyle & ~tf.getStyle(); if ((fake & Typeface.BOLD) != 0) { paint.setFakeBoldText(true); } if ((fake & Typeface.ITALIC) != 0) { paint.setTextSkewX(-0.25f); } paint.setTypeface(tf); } }
