How to make the first character much larger than other in a TextView

Question

I would like to display a paragraph of long text as follow. Here is the snapshot from Flipboard.

In order to achieve such effect, I tried to use 2 TextViews.

<LinearLayout
    android:orientation="horizontal"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" >

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textView3"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:textSize="40sp"
        android:text="T" />

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textView4"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="76dp"
        android:text="op British supermarket Tesco (LSE: TSCO) (NASDAQOTH: TSCDY.US) is due to announce its half year results on" />

</LinearLayout>

I get the following result.

Quite close. But not what I want. This is because the 2nd line and the 3rd line is not align to the left most. The left most space for 2nd line and 3rd line, is occupied by the TextView with large font.

Is there any better technique I can use, such as the one in Flipboard's?

Answer 1

By using a single TextView with BufferType.SPANNABLE will solve the problem.

final SpannableString spannableString = new SpannableString(title);
int position = 0;
for (int i = 0, ei = title.length(); i < ei; i++) {
    char c = title.charAt(i);
    if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9')) {
        position = i;
        break;
    }
}
spannableString.setSpan(new RelativeSizeSpan(2.0f), position, position + 1, Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
//titleTextView.setText(spannableString.toString());
titleTextView.setText(spannableString, BufferType.SPANNABLE);