Question

I am trying to put some loooong text into an AlertDialog.
The only issue the default font size that is really too big, so I want to make it smaller.

Here are all the workaround I tried and their issues.

Workaround 1) Using a TextView and myView.setTextSize(12);

final TextView myView = new TextView(getApplicationContext());
myView.setText(myLongText);
myView.setTextSize(12);
final AlertDialog d = new AlertDialog.Builder(context)
    .setPositiveButton(android.R.string.ok, null)
.setTitle(myTitle)
.setView(myView)
.create();

Issues: Layout is not scrolling

Workaround 2) making TextView scrollable.

message.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

Issues: Layout is scrolling, bute there is no “inertia” (don’t know how to call that.. But I guess you understand.)

Workaround 3) Using a Scrollview.

That’s what I am going to try, but I cannot believe there are no easier solutions…

Answer 1

You can actually get access to the message’s TextView pretty easily, and then change it’s size. I tested with a bigger size, but you could use whatever size you want. The text will scroll nicely as it already does. The view’s id is android.R.id.message

    AlertDialog dialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(this).setMessage("Hello world").show();
    TextView textView = (TextView) dialog.findViewById(android.R.id.message);
    textView.setTextSize(40);

This is probably a cleaner solution, though I’m not sure if there’s a risk that the TextView could be null or not.