Question

I have an Activity for which I obviously have a layout. The layout’s background is an image and the TextView placement needs to be in a precise place. When I place the TextView in any layout, the position doesn’t change with the scaling of the background image as I expect.

How do I get the TextView to scale based on the size of the screen?

The simplest solution will be accepted.

Answer 1

Your question is a little vague, but assuming what you’re going for is ‘put the TextView over the speech bubble in the above image’, you may have a bit of work ahead of you. You could attempt to use margins and such to give it a precise placement over the speech image, but this will be quite tricky and will probably never work exactly like you want. Your simplest option would be to do the following

1. Use Photoshop, Paint, or just about any editing program to cut out Bart and the speech bubble and save them as seperate images.
2. Use a RelativeLayout with the background color set to black android:background="@android:color/black".
3. Place an ImageView using the graphic of Bart, and set the following properties on it: android:layout_alignParentLeft="true", android:layout_alignParentBottom="true", and `android:id=”@id/img_bart”.
4. Place a TextView, set the background to use the speech bubble image (android:background="@drawable/img_speech" or whatever you called the speech bubble image), set it to appear to the right of Bart android:layout_toRightOf="@id/img_bart", and either snap it to the top (android:layout_alignParentTop="true" – this may cause issues on tall screens though), or snap to the bottom offset by an appropriate amount through android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" and android:layout_marginBottom="150dp", modifying the 150 to get it to appear at the right height relative to Bart.

I know it’s a fair bit of work, unfortunately Android layouts often are, especially in cases where you want to get different elements to stick together in appropriate ways, like speech bubbles.

Another thing you could look at is AbsoluteLayout, which allows you to place child elements in exact locations – however this is strongly discouraged as it won’t scale well to different screen sizes, and the AbsoluteLayout class itself is deprecated and has been for a very long time.