How to Change Your Spinner Typeface

Pretty much every widget in Android that contains text has a setTypeface method...except for Spinners. I looked around in vain for an example or tutorial that would demonstrate how to set the typeface for text in a spinner, so I asked for help in a couple of forums. Mark Murphy replied with a proposed solution, and Philip helped explain the answer to me, so for anyone who needs to do this in an Android app and doesn't know how, hope this helps.

First, create a new XML file in your res/layout directory called "my_spinner_style.xml", and put in something like the following content:

android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:textSize="9pt"
android:singleLine="True"
android:id="@+id/spinnerTarget"
android:textColor="#000000"
android:gravity="center"/>

Then in your code, use something like this:

Spinner mySpinner = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.my_spinner);
mySpinnerArrayAdapter = new MyCustomArrayAdapter(this, R.layout.my_spinner_style); mySpinnerArrayAdapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);

Normally you would create a new ArrayAdapter for the second line, but in this case you need to create a custom ArrayAdapter and override the methods that get the TextView from our custom spinner style.

So, you need to put in the code for your custom ArrayAdapter, like so:

private class MyArrayAdapter extends ArrayAdapter {

public MyArrayAdapter(Context context, int textViewResourceId) {
super(context, textViewResourceId);
}

public TextView getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
TextView v = (TextView) super.getView(position, convertView, parent);
v.setTypeface(myFont);
return v;
}

public TextView getDropDownView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
TextView v = (TextView) super.getView(position, convertView, parent);
v.setTypeface(myFont);
return v;
}

}

The font you want to use needs to reside in the assets/fonts directory, and you access it like so:

Typeface myFont = Typeface.createFromAsset(getAssets(), "fonts/myfont.ttf");

And that's pretty much it. I always appreciate it when I'm having a problem and I Google around and find in someone's blog that they've already dealt with the same issue, so I hope this helps someone.