KerningViews provides a set of views (currently only TextView and Button) which lets you adjust the spacing between the characters in the text of that view also know as Kerning.

Kerning is a common feature in design apps like Photoshop or Sketch, but Android natively doesn't allow Kerning. From API level 21, Android allows you to do this using setLetterSpacing attribute , but there is no way to achieve this in pre-21 devices.

KerningViews provides a simple API to achieve this feature in TextView and Button text across all API levels in Android.

This screenshot is from the sample app showing different text with different spacing (kerning factor).

This library is available in jCenter which is the default Maven repository used in Android Studio.

dependencies {
    // other dependencies here
    implementation 'com.andrognito.kerningview:kerningview:x.y.z'
}

You should see the sample app for complete usage details. You can either use these views and set the attribute via XML or programmatically change the kerning factor as required.

Just use the KerningTextView or KerningButton in your XML layouts. If you do not put the kv_spacing attribute then it will behave as a normal TextView with no letter spacing.

You can customize the letter spacing by using the kv_spacing attribute with different kerning factor (supports floating point values).

<com.andrognito.kerningview.KerningTextView
       android:id="@+id/text1"
       android:layout_width="wrap_content"
       android:layout_height="wrap_content"
       android:fontFamily="sans-serif"
       android:text="@string/sample_text_1"
       android:textSize="@dimen/text_size_xlarge"
       app:kv_spacing="10" />

Just reference the views from your layout and use the setter to change the letter spacing of the texts.

KerningTextView mText = (KerningTextView) findViewById(R.id.text);
mText.setKerningFactor(3.5f);

This is a very simple and tiny library that solves one simple use case.But I would love to accept contributions to improve or add functionality to it. It is my first library too.

Design-focussed Engineer. Full-stack Developer. Hardcore Android Geek. UI/UX Designer. Part-time Blogger.

Copyright 2016 aritraroy

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