CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidlayout
Zbarcea Christian
Zbarcea Christian

Reputation: 9548

Android: how to calculate dpi from a design?

I have a 800 x 480 (landscape) design made in photoshop and now I'm trying to implement the same design on Android.

How am I supposed to calculate width and height for a LinearLayout? For example, a header has 800px width and 60px height. How many DPI they are?

The min and the target SDK are 14. Am I need to worry for devices that are using a smaller display? (Smaller than 480x800) ? (I don't know if older devices can run Android 4+)

I have tested on my AVD (Nexus 7) and this is how it's look (accordingly to my photoshop design):

enter image description here

But on a tablet:

enter image description here

Am I need to create different layouts for different devices?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1196

Answers (1)

Dmitry Zaytsev
Dmitry Zaytsev

Reputation: 23962

First thing that you need to understand - for which density your design is. Most common situation is design in mdpi, which means that 1dp on device (with mdpi screen) will be equivalent to 1px of design layout. On devices with higher density it will be increased accordingly (4:6:8 rule).

Second thing - providing values in dp won't magically scale up your layout for larger devices. Note, that dpi is not the same as screen resolution. So, for example, large 10inch tablet with 1280x800 screen resolution is mdpi device (not hdpi, not xhdpi).

Third. It makes no sense to say "800x600 device is smaller that 1280x800", because they may both be, for example, 4inch phone.

Fourth. Screen resolution have nothing to do with SDK version.

What you need to do, is look for another design for larger devices or ask designer about what he wanted to see. Maybe images shouldn't be strictly sized in dp, maybe they should be sized in percentage of the occupied screen?

Upvotes: 3

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