Question

1) How would one go about altering/extending TextView to render inline images?

It seems that setText(Html.fromHtml(…image tags…)) might actually allow image insertion if set up correctly, but I haven’t tried myself. Even if, I would still need fine grained control over the image drawing (my final goal is to display inline animated smiley images). So unfortunately a view based on WebKit or similar is not an option either.

2) As an alternative solution I thought of mixing TextViews and ImageViews (or more specifically, custom subclasses thereof which allow animation), but I’m not sure how I could achieve proper wrapping there (I’m fairly new to Android).

Answer 1

this tutorial should help you:
http://techdroid.kbeanie.com/2010/06/textview-with-html-content.html

specifically this section of the tutorial …

static ImageGetter imgGetter = new Html.ImageGetter() {
             @Override
             public Drawable getDrawable(String source) {
                   Drawable drawable = null;
                   drawable = Drawable.createFromPath(source);  // Or fetch it from the URL
                   // Important
                   drawable.setBounds(0, 0, drawable.getIntrinsicWidth(), drawable
                                 .getIntrinsicHeight());
                   return drawable;
             }
      };

EDIT: found another tutorial, which I thought looked neater: http://androidjava.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/images-in-textview/