Android use font-awesome font as icon in menu item

Question

I'm just learning android so sorry for my lack of knowledge on the subject. I mainly work as a Web Developer and we use Font Awesome all the time so I was trying to get it to work with Android. I first found out I could use font awesome here. With some deeper searching I found out how to put a font awesome icon in the action menu bar in the title here. I am missing out on having the ability to have backup text when there is room by setting the title instead of the icon and the title.

I was wondering if I could set the icon in font awesome instead of the title and just have normal descriptive text for the title. It wants a drawable or drawable resource id when I do the setIcon method on the menu-item. Could I convert it to a drawable? What is the best way to approach keeping font awesome for the icon and having both the icon and title? Any help or direction is appreciated.

So I have the following code in my main activity:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

   @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        // https://stackoverflow.com/a/32780748/2066736
        getSupportActionBar().setDisplayShowHomeEnabled(true);
        getSupportActionBar().setLogo(R.drawable.redbird_webkit_onwht);
        getSupportActionBar().setDisplayUseLogoEnabled(true);

        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
        // Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present.
        getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main_menu, menu);

        setFontAwesomeMenuItem(menu, R.string.icon_calendar, R.id.action_calendar);
        setFontAwesomeMenuItem(menu, R.string.icon_search, R.id.action_search);
        setFontAwesomeMenuItem(menu, R.string.icon_plus, R.id.action_new_post);

        // menu.add(0, MENU_ITEM_LOGOUT, 102, R.string.logout);

        return true;
    }

    private void setFontAwesomeMenuItem (Menu menu, int rIdString, int rIdIdOfElement) {
        SpannableString s = new SpannableString(getString(rIdString));
        s.setSpan(new TypefaceSpan(this, "fontawesome-webfont.ttf"), 0, s.length(),
                Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

        menu.findItem(rIdIdOfElement).setTitle(s);
    }
}

And I got the following TypefaceSpan class from here:

/**
 * Style a {@link Spannable} with a custom {@link Typeface}.
 *
 * @author Tristan Waddington
 * copied from https://stackoverflow.com/a/15181195/2066736
 */
public class TypefaceSpan extends MetricAffectingSpan {
    /** An <code>LruCache</code> for previously loaded typefaces. */
    private static LruCache<String, Typeface> sTypefaceCache =
            new LruCache<String, Typeface>(12);

    private Typeface mTypeface;

    /**
     * Load the {@link Typeface} and apply to a {@link Spannable}.
     */
    public TypefaceSpan(Context context, String typefaceName) {
        mTypeface = sTypefaceCache.get(typefaceName);

        if (mTypeface == null) {
            mTypeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(context.getApplicationContext()
                    .getAssets(), String.format("fonts/%s", typefaceName));

            // Cache the loaded Typeface
            sTypefaceCache.put(typefaceName, mTypeface);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void updateMeasureState(TextPaint p) {
        p.setTypeface(mTypeface);

        // Note: This flag is required for proper typeface rendering
        p.setFlags(p.getFlags() | Paint.SUBPIXEL_TEXT_FLAG);
    }

    @Override
    public void updateDrawState(TextPaint tp) {
        tp.setTypeface(mTypeface);

        // Note: This flag is required for proper typeface rendering
        tp.setFlags(tp.getFlags() | Paint.SUBPIXEL_TEXT_FLAG);
    }
}

Answer 1

Answer is late but for future visitors there is a great library for working with font awesome in android called iconify written by JoanZapata. You can find it here

After library being corectly initialized you can do something like this with your ActionBar menu item:

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

   <item
       android:id="@+id/item_menu
       showAsAction="always"
       android:title="@string/title"/>

</menu>

and from java code you only need to do something like this:

 menu.findItem(R.id.item_menu).setIcon(
    new IconDrawable(this, FontAwesomeIcons.fa_share)
    .colorRes(R.color.ab_icon)
    .actionBarSize());

Hope this would help someone :) Ask, if you have any questions:)

Answer 2

Please check this:

TextDrawable faIcon = new TextDrawable(this);
faIcon.setTextSize(TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_DIP, 20);
faIcon.setTextAlign(Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_CENTER);
faIcon.setTypeface(FontAwesomeManager.getTypeface(this, FontAwesomeManager.FONTAWESOME));
faIcon.setText(getResources().getText(R.string.fa_android));
Menu menu = (Menu) findViewById(R.id.menu);
MenuItem menuItem = menu.findItem(R.id.menu_item);
menuItem.setIcon(faIcon);

You can get TextDrawable class from here

Source