I have some text which has some bolded parts. Until KitKat this strategy (as mentioned in this post) worked perfectly well
My strings resources file:
Put your custom font in android assets under folder name "font" or whatever you want
Try this
myTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(this.getAssets(), "fonts/<>.ttf");
in onCreate() then
onCreate()
[use youcontroll].setTypeface(myTypeface);
Best of Luck...