[android] How to set the font style to bold, italic and underlined in an Android TextView?

I want to make a TextView's content bold, italic and underlined. I tried the following code and it works, but doesn't underline.

<Textview android:textStyle="bold|italic" ..

How do I do it? Any quick ideas?

Just one line of code in xml

        android:textStyle="italic"

This is an easy way to add an underline, while maintaining other settings:

textView.setPaintFlags(textView.getPaintFlags() | Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

This should make your TextView bold, underlined and italic at the same time.

strings.xml

<resources>
    <string name="register"><u><b><i>Copyright</i></b></u></string>
</resources>

To set this String to your TextView, do this in your main.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TextView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/textview"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:text="@string/register" />

or In JAVA,

TextView textView = new TextView(this);
textView.setText(R.string.register);

Sometimes the above approach will not be helpful when you might have to use Dynamic Text. So in that case SpannableString comes into action.

String tempString="Copyright";
TextView text=(TextView)findViewById(R.id.text);
SpannableString spanString = new SpannableString(tempString);
spanString.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, spanString.length(), 0);
spanString.setSpan(new StyleSpan(Typeface.BOLD), 0, spanString.length(), 0);
spanString.setSpan(new StyleSpan(Typeface.ITALIC), 0, spanString.length(), 0);
text.setText(spanString);

OUTPUT

If you are reading that text from a file or from the network.

You can achieve it by adding HTML tags to your text like mentioned

This text is <i>italic</i> and <b>bold</b>
and <u>underlined</u> <b><i><u>bolditalicunderlined</u></b></i>

and then you can use the HTML class that processes HTML strings into displayable styled text.

// textString is the String after you retrieve it from the file
textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(textString));

    style="?android:attr/listSeparatorTextViewStyle

• by making this style, u can achieve underlining

You can achieve it easily by using Kotlin's buildSpannedString{} under its core-ktx dependency.

val formattedString = buildSpannedString {
    append("Regular")
    bold { append("Bold") }
    italic { append("Italic") }
    underline { append("Underline") }
    bold { italic {append("Bold Italic")} }
}

textView.text = formattedString

Programmatialy:

You can do programmatically using setTypeface() method:

Below is the code for default Typeface

textView.setTypeface(null, Typeface.NORMAL);      // for Normal Text
textView.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD);        // for Bold only
textView.setTypeface(null, Typeface.ITALIC);      // for Italic
textView.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD_ITALIC); // for Bold and Italic

and if you want to set custom Typeface:

textView.setTypeface(textView.getTypeface(), Typeface.NORMAL);      // for Normal Text
textView.setTypeface(textView.getTypeface(), Typeface.BOLD);        // for Bold only
textView.setTypeface(textView.getTypeface(), Typeface.ITALIC);      // for Italic
textView.setTypeface(textView.getTypeface(), Typeface.BOLD_ITALIC); // for Bold and Italic

XML:

You can set Directly in XML file in like:

android:textStyle="normal"
android:textStyle="normal|bold"
android:textStyle="normal|italic"
android:textStyle="bold"
android:textStyle="bold|italic"

Or just like this in Kotlin:

val tv = findViewById(R.id.textViewOne) as TextView
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD_ITALIC)
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD or Typeface.ITALIC)
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD)
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.ITALIC)
// AND
tv.paintFlags = tv.paintFlags or Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG

Or in Java:

TextView tv = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textViewOne);
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD_ITALIC);
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD|Typeface.ITALIC);
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.BOLD);
// OR
tv.setTypeface(null, Typeface.ITALIC);
// AND
tv.setPaintFlags(tv.getPaintFlags()|Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

Keep it simple and in one line :)

Without quotes works for me:

<item name="android:textStyle">bold|italic</item>

For bold and italic whatever you are doing is correct for underscore use following code

HelloAndroid.java

 package com.example.helloandroid;

 import android.app.Activity;
 import android.os.Bundle;
 import android.text.SpannableString;
 import android.text.style.UnderlineSpan;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class HelloAndroid extends Activity {
TextView textview;
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    textview = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textview);
    SpannableString content = new SpannableString(getText(R.string.hello));
    content.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, content.length(), 0);
    textview.setText(content);
}
}

main.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TextView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="@+id/textview"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:text="@string/hello"
android:textStyle="bold|italic"/>

string.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <resources>
  <string name="hello">Hello World, HelloAndroid!</string>
  <string name="app_name">Hello, Android</string>
</resources>