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Asked: 2026-06-14T21:27:16+00:00

I have a problem that I can not really solve. I have created a

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I have a problem that I can not really solve. I have created a graphing app which will contain data with alot of data points. To enable scrolling in the graph i create a bitmap of the graph data, and the shift / move the bitmap to the right or left of the screen depending on the user input. The bitmap is always the graph view height and graph view width. When the user moves the bitmap, i shift the bitmap with:

memoryCanvas.drawBitmap(memoryBitmap, bitmapShift, 0.0f, paint);

where shift is a a float value containing the shifting values.

Now, on most devices i have tried this is, it works very nice. I have tried it on HTC Desire, Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S. When testing this on my own Galaxy S however, i get strange results that i can not explain. Do note that my Galaxy S contains a custom rom (with android 4.0.4), so that is probably the reason why i get this behavior, but i still can not understand it or properly mitigate it.

So in a normal use case behavior, the bitmaps get shifted by bitmapShift number of pixels, and then i fill in the empty space by normal line drawing. But when using my phone, dragging the bitmap either direction slowly, so the bitmapShift values are around 0.5, the bitmap does not move, or only moves sometimes. I have compared the bitmapShift on the other platforms and they are in the same range, 0.5 when dragging slowly. This behavior does of course screw up my drawings a lot. This does also happen when doing fast dragging, but its most visible when doing it slowly.

I can not really figure out what causes this behavior. The bitmap does not move according to my bitmapShift value. It does on all other platforms i have tried. If i skip using bitmaps, and only draw lines according to the shifting values, everything works fine.

Does anyone have any idea on what could cause this behavior? Im kinda running out after sitting some days trying to figure it out. The critical code is below. This code is in my onDraw function.

memoryCanvas.setBitmap(emptyBitmap); //First set another bitmap to clear 
memoryCanvas.drawColor(Color.TRANSPARENT, PorterDuff.Mode.CLEAR); //Clear it
memoryCanvas.drawBitmap(memoryBitmap, bitmapShift, 0.0f, paint); //Draw shifted bitmap on it
memoryCanvas.drawLines(lineDrawPoints, 0 , cnt, paint); //Draw remaining lines
memoryCanvas.setBitmap(memoryBitmap); //Set the original 
memoryCanvas.drawColor(Color.TRANSPARENT, PorterDuff.Mode.CLEAR); //Clear original
memoryCanvas.drawBitmap(emptyBitmap, 0.0f, 0.0f, paint); //Draw the final image                 
canvas.drawBitmap(memoryBitmap, 0, 0.0f, paint); //And finally draw on real canvas

Any help, tips, suggestions are very welcome.

Cheers
Wilhelm

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When there is only a simple transform set on Canvas (a simple transform = translate only, no rotate, no scale), Skia, Android’s 2D rendering library, aligns bitmaps to the pixel grid. This means that a move by less than 1 pixel might not be visible at all. A silly workaround is to set a very, very small scale or rotate transform on Canvas before drawing your bitmap. This has the side effect of not snapping bitmaps to the pixel grid.

    I think I should just add a new API on Paint to let apps do subpixel positioning of bitmaps no matter what transform is set.

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