I'm building a widget which displays some text. By widget I mean the kind which lies on the desktop.

The problem is that I want to change text's font at runtime. There is several textview I would like, at runtime, to set the first as bold, the second blue and italic for example, etc.

I came up with this :

TextView tv = new TextView(context); tv.setText(stringToDisplay); tv.setTextColor(0xa00050ff); // example tv.setTextSize(30); // example

Bitmap b = loadBitmapFromView(tv); updateViews.setImageViewBitmap(R.id.id_of_the_imageview, b);

with

private static Bitmap loadBitmapFromView(View v) { Bitmap b = Bitmap.createBitmap(v.getLayoutParams().width, v.getLayoutParams().height, Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888); Canvas c = new Canvas(b); v.layout(0, 0, v.getLayoutParams().width, v.getLayoutParams().height); v.draw(c); return b; }

but it wont work (NullPointerException on first line of loadBitmap), until I replace v.getLayoutParams().width, v.getLayoutParams().height by fixed sizes like 250, 50

Bitmap b = Bitmap.createBitmap(250, 50, Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888);
// ...
v.layout(0, 0, 250, 50);

But that's not a good solution ...

so I tried this :

LayoutInflater li = (LayoutInflater) context.getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); View row = li.inflate(R.layout.widget_text, null);

TextView tv = (TextView) row.findViewById(R.id.id_of_the_textview);

widget_text being a layout similar to the displayed one but with TextViews instead of ImageViews, in the hope to get some size information out of it ..

but it's not working and I get this exception :

01-02 17:35:06.001: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(11025): Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: width and height must be > 0

on the call to Bitmap.createBitmap()

so, someone could point me in the right direction?