CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlandroidwebviewtextview
chucky
chucky

Reputation: 110

Recommended approach for presenting formatted text in Android?

I am developing an application that will provide instructions to making a product. The text will have bullets and/or numbered steps as well regular text paragraphs. I may have headings for various sections. The text will be placed into a scrollable TexView.

I was originally planning on loading the text from a resource text file and then applying formatting via xml. However, I just learned about WebView and the ability to load local html files. I could easily format the text in html and load it into a WebView for the various activities.

My question is, is there a performance issue with using WebView vs. TextView? Are there other ways to easily format text for a TextView?

Thanks,

Upvotes: 7

Views: 2475

Answers (1)

CommonsWare
CommonsWare

Reputation: 1007624

WebView definitely takes longer to load the first time into your process. It also is not designed to go in a ScrollView, since it scrolls itself. OTOH, you get excellent HTML support.

TextView can display limited HTML, converted into a SpannedString via Html.fromHtml(). Here is a blog post where I list the HTML tags supported by the Android 2.1 edition of fromHtml(). Note that these are undocumented, and so the roster of tags may be different in other Android releases.

Upvotes: 4

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