Question

Is it possible to render different textSize for a phone and a tablet? Let’s say I want to use “14sp” if it is a phone and “18sp” if it is a tablet.

Tablet has little more real estate so it would be better if we can increase the font size a bit to make it more legible.

Should we use styles and have two styles folder like styles/ and styles-sw600dp/ and specify font sizes there? What is the best way to do it system wide instead of having to specify the style in every element?

Answer 1

You should specify dimensions for this not styles.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
     <dimen name="my_font_size">14sp</dimen>
</resources>

in values/dimensions.xml and

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
     <dimen name="my_font_size">18sp</dimen>
</resources>

in values-large/dimensions.xml or values-sw600dp/dimensions.xml I generally put tablet stuff in values-large because there are still a significant amount of Gingerbread tablets in use. Then, you can reference it wherever with:

android:textSize="@dimen/my_font_size"