FlowTextView

A wrapping TextView for Android

I originally uploaded this project on Google code over 2 years ago but I left it to rot and never maintained it so I decided to 'hub it and start refactoring it. Pull requests welcome!

A TextView that extends RelativeLayout. The text will wrap around any child views inside the layout.

This widget has basic support for HTML using Html.fromHtml("< your markup ... />") It will recognise links, bold italic etc.

How to use

Add to your XML layout with your child views inside it:

<uk.co.deanwild.flowtextview.FlowTextView
	android:id="@+id/ftv"
	android:layout_width="fill_parent"
	android:layout_height="wrap_content" >

		<ImageView
			android:layout_width="wrap_content"
			android:layout_height="wrap_content"
			android:layout_alignParentLeft="true"
			android:layout_alignParentTop="true"
			android:padding="10dip"
			android:src="@drawable/android"/>

		<ImageView
			android:layout_width="wrap_content"
			android:layout_height="wrap_content"
			android:layout_alignParentRight="true"
			android:layout_marginTop="400dip"
			android:padding="10dip"
			android:src="@drawable/android2"/>
</uk.co.deanwild.flowtextview.FlowTextView>

Then in your code:

		FlowTextView flowTextView = (FlowTextView) findViewById(R.id.ftv);
        Spanned html = Html.fromHtml("<html>Your html goes here....");
        flowTextView.setText(html);

Download

If you're still using Eclipse then grab the latest JAR version

Otherwise you can grab it using Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>uk.co.deanwild</groupId>
  <artifactId>flowtextview</artifactId>
  <version>2.0.2</version>
  <type>aar</type>
</dependency>

or Gradle:

compile 'uk.co.deanwild:flowtextview:2.0.2@aar'

License

Copyright 2014 Dean Wild

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

History

I needed to have a text wrap around images and other views in an Android App but I was surprised and frustrated to discover that there was no way to do this natively.

The general consensus was that the only practical way to achieve this was to use WebViews.

Using webviews is a bit bloaty and overkill to achieve this. We lose the direct control and performance of using native widgets.

So I developed a native widget which extends RelativeLayout (I figured this was more versatile than LinearLayout) which is capable of painting text around its child views.

The code is still a little rough and I suspect it could be vastly improved in many areas but it seems to work quite well.

TODO