How can I set a word as bold in a TextView with fontFamily open sans semi bold in Android?

Question

I need help to understand the following issue.

I need to set a single word of a TextView as bold.

I have a layout with a TextView with id myTextView :

  <TextView
      android:id="@+id/myTextView"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:fontFamily="@font/open_sans_semi_bold"
      android:textColor="#d94256"
      android:textSize="20sp" />

I set text to this view programmatically this way:

myTextView.text = HtmlCompat.fromHtml("My fancy string where I want to show this <b>word</b> bold", HtmlCompat.FROM_HTML_MODE_LEGACY)

Also, I tried to use spannable string builder but I got the result of this image in both cases.

Why don't I get something like this ? I get this result when I change this line:

android:fontFamily="@font/open_sans_semi_bold"

for this one:

android:fontFamily="@font/open_sans_regular"

And also, if I set

android:fontFamily="@font/open_sans_bold"

I can see this result

I found the ttf files for open_sans_semi_bold , open_sans_bold and open_sans_regular in a google git repository.

Isn't Html <b> tag supposed to be as bold as OpenSans Bold?

Answer 1

This is my string highlight function. Shows substring bold, in addition you can define different color for highlighted string if you want.

@Nullable
public static Spannable highlightString(@NonNull String s, @NonNull String subString, int color) {

    int startPos = s.toLowerCase(Locale.getDefault()).indexOf(subString.toLowerCase(Locale.getDefault()));
    int endPos = startPos + subString.length();

    if (startPos != -1) {
        Spannable spannable = new SpannableString(s);
        ColorStateList colorStateList = new ColorStateList(new int[][]{new int[]{}}, new int[]{color});
        TextAppearanceSpan highlightSpan = new TextAppearanceSpan(null, Typeface.BOLD, -1, colorStateList, null);
        try {
            spannable.setSpan(highlightSpan, startPos, endPos, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        return spannable;
    }
    else
        return null;
}

Usage:

Spannable highlightedText = highlightString("My fancy string where I want to show this word bold", "word", Color.BLUE);
if (highlightedText != null)
    myTextView.setText(highlightedText);