I'm looking for an optimal way to resize wrapping text in a TextView
so that it will fit within its getHeight and getWidth bounds. I'm not simply looking for a way to wrap the text- I want to make sure it both wraps and is small enough to fit entirely on the screen.
I've seen a few cases on StackOverflow where auto resizing was needed, but they are either very special cases with hack solutions, have no solution, or involve re-drawing the TextView
recursively until it is small enough (which is memory intense and forces the user to watch the text shrink step-by-step with every recursion).
But I'm sure somebody out there has found a good solution that doesn't involve what I'm doing: writing several heavy routines that parse and measure the text, resize the text, and repeat until a suitably small size has been found.
What routines does TextView
use to wrap the text? Couldn't those be somehow used to predict whether text will be small enough?
tl;dr: is there a best-practice way to auto-resize a TextView
to fit, wrapped, in its getHeight and getWidth bounds?
Best Answer
As a mobile developer, I was sad to find nothing native that supports auto resizing. My searches did not turn up anything that worked for me and in the end, I spent the better half of my weekend and created my own auto resize text view. I will post the code here and hopefully it will be useful for someone else.
This class uses a static layout with the text paint of the original text view to measure the height. From there, I step down by 2 font pixels and remeasure until I have a size that fits. At the end, if the text still does not fit, I append an ellipsis. I had requirements to animate the text and reuse views and this seems to work well on the devices I have and seems to run fast enough for me.
Warning. There is an important fixed bug affecting Android 3.1 - 4.04 causing all AutoResizingTextView widgets not to work. Please read: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21851157/2075875