Question

I have a TextView inside a ScrollView, the TextView is filled with a large text which only some part of its text is visible on screen at anytime.
Now I want to (programmatically) force some part of the text to be visible for user. for example, my text is:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut id ante tellus. Nulla facilisi. Sed gravida fringilla velit, non sollicitudin tellus egestas non. Cras congue, nulla id bibendum tempus, dui dui blandit elit, elementum dictum dolor eros et mi. Nullam leo tellus, aliquet vel tincidunt sed, suscipit nec dui. Nunc dapibus, odio vestibulum hendrerit vestibulum, lorem orci dictum arcu, quis porttitor lorem libero sit amet odio. Sed imperdiet viverra diam, eu porttitor ipsum fringilla et. Suspendisse consectetur sapien ac felis tincidunt dictum. Suspendisse ultrices porta dignissim. Maecenas in nibh sed nisi facilisis dignissim non ut tortor. Pellentesque eleifend tempus sem, sit amet mattis arcu auctor id. Vivamus at tortor rutrum diam vestibulum adipiscing. Suspendisse potenti. Integer sollicitudin laoreet enim ac suscipit. Quisque convallis facilisis pharetra.

I want to force the bold word (tortor in this example) to be visible to the user (maybe by scrolling the textview vertically with a correct value).
Is there any way to do this?

EDIT: I don’t want to make the word bold! question updated to clarify my request.

Answer 1

Here is one way to scroll to a particular word:

public void scrollToWord(String string) {
    TextView textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text1);
    String text = textView.getText().toString();

    // Find the first occurrence of the word 
    int position = text.indexOf(string);
    // Calculate how far in the word is: 30%, 40%, 73% 
    int percent = (int) (position / (double) text.length() * 100);
    // Calculate how far to scroll
    int y = textView.getHeight() * percent;

    // Finally scroll
    ((ScrollView) textView.getParent()).scrollTo(0, y);
}

I have two notes on this:

1. This only scrolls to the first occurrence, but it is easy enough to change to String.indexOf(string, start) and find the second, third, etc.

2. If you want to scroll to this position as soon as the app has started, you must wait until after onResume() has finished. But there is no method for this… I suggest using a Handler and I can help you with that if you need it.

Hope that helps!