Question

I am having trouble removing anti-aliasing on a 9-patch png and a normal drawable that is tiled to make a background. I am using the 9-patch as a background for my EditText controls and the tiled drawable is used as a background for an ImageView to create the ‘divider’.

Here is some enlarged versions of my 9 patch png (it’s hard to show white graphics so I filled in the transparent areas in blue):

And my tiled background image along with the xml that defines the tiled pattern:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<bitmap xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:src="@drawable/border_diagonal_lines"
    android:tileMode="repeat"
    />

Here is the whole thing put together:

The screenshot on the left is what I currently get and the screenshot on the right is what I want it to look like. What could I do to achieve the desired effect?

I also would like the imageview with the tiled background to always be 3 pixels tall regardless of screen resolution but using ‘pixels’ as units is generally a bad idea. Is there a way round this?

Answer 1

It isn’t anti-aliasing your graphics, it’s probably scaling them (which, granted, may also perform anti-aliasing, but it’s not the cause). Are you placing them in the correct density-specific folder? (e.g. drawable-hdpi, drawable-xhdpi, etc.) If you are doing that, also make sure you are not using the android:anyDensity="true" tag in your manifest.

I also would like the imageview with the tiled background to always be
3 pixels tall regardless of screen resolution but using ‘pixels’ as
units is generally a bad idea. Is there a way round this?

It’s discouraged in general cases, when the system should be handling scaling for multiple densities (using DP instead), but if you specifically need something 3 pixels tall, then there’s nothing “bad” about specifying a pixel height.