Android: TextView: Remove spacing and padding on t

Question

When I have a TextView with a \n in the text,, on the right I have two singleLine TextViews, one below the other with no spacing in between. I have set the following for all three TextViews.

android:lineSpacingMultiplier="1" 
android:lineSpacingExtra="0pt" 
android:paddingTop="0pt" 
android:paddingBottom="0pt"

The first line of the left TextView lines up perfectly with the top right TextView.

The second line of the left TextView is a little higher than the second line of the bottom right TextView.

It seems that there is some kind of hidden padding on the top and the bottom of the TextViews. How can I remove that?

Answer 1

I searched a lot for proper answer but no where I could find an Answer which could exactly remove all the padding from the TextView, but finally after going through the official doc got a work around for Single Line Texts

android:includeFontPadding="false"
android:lineSpacingExtra="0dp"

Adding these two lines to TextView xml will do the work.
First attribute removes the padding reserved for accents and second attribute removes the spacing reserved to maintain proper space between two lines of text.

Make sure not to add lineSpacingExtra="0dp" in multiline TextView as it might make the appearance clumsy

Answer 2

You can try to use this attribute(ConstraintLayout):layout_constraintBaseline_toBaselineOf

Like this:

app:layout_constraintBaseline_toBaselineOf="@+id/textView"

Answer 3

To my knowledge this is inherent to most widgets and the amount of "padding" differs among phone manufacturers. This padding is really white space between the image border and the image in the 9 patch image file.

For example on my Droid X, spinner widgets get extra white space than buttons, which makes it look awkward when you have a spinner inline with a button, yet on my wife's phone the same application doesn't have the same problem and looks great!

The only suggestion I would have is to create your own 9 patch files and use them in your application.

Ahhh the pains that are Android.

Edited: Clarify padding vs white space.

Answer 4

<RelativeLayout
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent">

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textView"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_alignBaseline="@+id/baselineImage"
        android:includeFontPadding="false" />

    <ImageView
        android:id="@+id/baselineImage"
        android:layout_width="1dp"
        android:layout_height="1dp"
        android:baselineAlignBottom="true"
        android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" />

    <!-- This view will be exactly 10dp below the baseline of textView -->
    <View
        android:id="@+id/view"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_marginTop="10dp"
        android:layout_below="@+id/baselineImage" />

</RelativeLayout>

With an extra ImageView we can set the TextView to be baseline aligned with the ImageView and set the android:baselineAlignBottom on the ImageView to true, which will make the baseline of ImageView to bottom. Other views can align itself using the bottom of the ImageView which itself is the same as the TextView's baseline.

This however only fixes the padding bottom not the top.

Answer 5

I remove the spacing in my custom view -- NoPaddingTextView.

https://github.com/SenhLinsh/NoPaddingTextView

package com.linsh.nopaddingtextview;

import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.util.Log;
import android.util.TypedValue;
import android.widget.TextView;

/**
 * Created by Senh Linsh on 17/3/27.
 */

public class NoPaddingTextView extends TextView {

    private int mAdditionalPadding;

    public NoPaddingTextView(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init();
    }


    public NoPaddingTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        init();
    }

    private void init() {
        setIncludeFontPadding(false);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        int yOff = -mAdditionalPadding / 6;
        canvas.translate(0, yOff);
        super.onDraw(canvas);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        getAdditionalPadding();

        int mode = MeasureSpec.getMode(heightMeasureSpec);
        if (mode != MeasureSpec.EXACTLY) {
            int measureHeight = measureHeight(getText().toString(), widthMeasureSpec);

            int height = measureHeight - mAdditionalPadding;
            height += getPaddingTop() + getPaddingBottom();
            heightMeasureSpec = MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(height, MeasureSpec.EXACTLY);
        }
        super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
    }

    private int measureHeight(String text, int widthMeasureSpec) {
        float textSize = getTextSize();

        TextView textView = new TextView(getContext());
        textView.setTextSize(TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_PX, textSize);
        textView.setText(text);
        textView.measure(widthMeasureSpec, 0);
        return textView.getMeasuredHeight();
    }

    private int getAdditionalPadding() {
        float textSize = getTextSize();

        TextView textView = new TextView(getContext());
        textView.setTextSize(TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_PX, textSize);
        textView.setLines(1);
        textView.measure(0, 0);
        int measuredHeight = textView.getMeasuredHeight();
        if (measuredHeight - textSize > 0) {
            mAdditionalPadding = (int) (measuredHeight - textSize);
            Log.v("NoPaddingTextView", "onMeasure: height=" + measuredHeight + " textSize=" + textSize + " mAdditionalPadding=" + mAdditionalPadding);
        }
        return mAdditionalPadding;
    }
}

Answer 6

Simply use

android:padding="0dp"