How to adjust text kerning in Android TextView?

Question

Is there a way to adjust the spacing between characters in an Android TextView? I believe this is typically called \"kerning\".

I\'m aware of the

Answer 1

Here's my solution, which adds uniform spacing (in pixels) between each character. This span assumes all text is in a single line. This basically implements what @commonsWare suggests.

SpannableStringBuilder builder = new SpannableStringBuilder("WIDE normal");
builder.setSpan(new TrackingSpan(20), 0, 4, Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
...

private static class TrackingSpan extends ReplacementSpan {
    private float mTrackingPx;

    public TrackingSpan(float tracking) {
        mTrackingPx = tracking;
    }

    @Override
    public int getSize(Paint paint, CharSequence text, 
        int start, int end, Paint.FontMetricsInt fm) {
        return (int) (paint.measureText(text, start, end) 
            + mTrackingPx * (end - start - 1));
    }

    @Override
    public void draw(Canvas canvas, CharSequence text, 
        int start, int end, float x, int top, int y, 
        int bottom, Paint paint) {
        float dx = x;
        for (int i = start; i < end; i++) {
            canvas.drawText(text, i, i + 1, dx, y, paint);
            dx += paint.measureText(text, i, i + 1) + mTrackingPx;
        }
    }
}