Custom Fonts and Custom Textview on Android

Question

From an application I need to develop, I've received a specific font that has many files like FontName-Regular, FontName-Bold, FontName-it. I need to use it in all the textviews in the application. First I thought it was an easy task. Look over SO and found a very nice thread:here

So first I did like:

public static void overrideFonts(final Context context, final View v) {
    try {
        if (v instanceof ViewGroup) {
            ViewGroup vg = (ViewGroup) v;
            for (int i = 0; i < vg.getChildCount(); i++) {
                View child = vg.getChildAt(i);
                overrideFonts(context, child);
            }
        } else if (v instanceof TextView) {
            ((TextView)v).setTypeface(FONT_REGULAR);
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        // ignore
    }
}

And called this method during onCreate in my activity. Every textView in my app was showing that font and boy, was I happy for getting away so easy. Until I got to a screen where some textviews required Bold as Style (android:textStyle="bold"). Then I realized that this solution does not provide me with possibility to load the Font-Bold.ttf from assets.

Than looked further and saw a nice custom TextView implementation, in the same SO question:

public class MyTextView extends TextView {

    public MyTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        init();
    }

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

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

    public void init() {

        Typeface tf = Typeface.createFromAsset(getContext().getAssets(), "font/chiller.ttf");
        setTypeface(tf ,1);

    }
    }

This looks even better. My question is: how can I detect on init() if my control has Style set to Bold or not so I can assign the requested TypeFace ?

Thank you for your time.

LE. Following the example below, I've updated my class as:

public class MyTextView extends TextView {

    Typeface normalTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(getContext().getAssets(), Constants.FONT_REGULAR);
    Typeface boldTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(getContext().getAssets(),  Constants.FONT_BOLD);

    public MyTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
    }

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

    public MyTextView(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public void setTypeface(Typeface tf, int style) {
        if (style == Typeface.BOLD) {
            super.setTypeface(boldTypeface/*, -1*/);
        } else {
            super.setTypeface(normalTypeface/*, -1*/);
        }
    }
}

Well If I debug, the app goes in setTypeFace and it seems to apply the bold one, but on my layout I can't see any change, not bold. No matter what font I use, no changes are done in my TextView and is displayed with the default android font. I wonder why ?

I have summed everything on a blog post here on my blog maybe it will help someone.

Answer 1

The constructor of TextView calls setTypeface(Typeface tf, int style) with the style parameter retrieved from the XML attribute android:textStyle. So, if you want to intercept this call to force your own typeface you can override this method as follow:

public void setTypeface(Typeface tf, int style) {
    Typeface normalTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(getContext().getAssets(), "font/your_normal_font.ttf");
    Typeface boldTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(getContext().getAssets(), "font/your_bold_font.ttf");

    if (style == Typeface.BOLD) {
        super.setTypeface(boldTypeface/*, -1*/);
    } else {
        super.setTypeface(normalTypeface/*, -1*/);
    }
}