Android text style missing light, medium, thin,

Question

When setting custom fonts for a textview, I can only choose normal, bold or italic:

How can I set the style to be light instead of bold in the following example?

<TextViewWithCustomFont
...
android:textStyle="bold"/>

Answer 1

This is font specific. Not all fonts have a light, medium, thin attribute/style, but the default font should. You can use the default light font by using fontFamily: sans-serif-light or for thin, fontFamily: sans-serif-thin.

For custom fonts, you would need to include the light version of the font and use it.

Answer 2

You can only combine those three attributes :

• normal
• bold
• italic

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextView.html#attr_android:textStyle

So it can be :

• normal
• bold
• italic
• bold | italic

Answer 3

Letter Spacing

As an adjacent solution to change a font's looks, you could use letterSpacing. This will change the distance between the letters within a TextView.

A positive number like 0.2 will add more of a gap, while negative like -0.1 will squish the letters together.

In Android 21+ you can programmatically call setLetterSpacing or in XML add letterSpacing.