Implement better text rendering for the titles

[rfgamaral]

As soon as I tried ViewPagerIndicator on my app, I noticed the title text rendering didn't look that great. I looked into the code to understand how the titles were being drawn and what could I do about it. They are being rendered on a Canvas using the Paint object.

There's nothing more it can be done about it, anti-aliasing is already enabled on the Paint object. The only thing it could be done is to change this:

mPaintText = new Paint();

Into this:

mPaintText = new Paint(Paint.LINEAR_TEXT_FLAG | Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG);

And also remove mPaintText.setAntiAlias(true);, but this does not give a better solution. Instead, we get a "different" solution. The rendering is just different. If it's better or worse, it really depends on the eye of the beholder.

If you don't know, the meaning of LINEAR_TEXT_FLAG, in the words of Android Developer Roman Guy, is this:

"Text rendering uses a font cache containing bitmap representations of each glyph the application needs. Linear text basically lets you skip the font cache."

So, my suggestion is this:

Get rid of the Paint object and use TextViews instead for each title. The TextView rendering is much better, here's an example on my app's implementation of the ViewPagerIndicator:

I understand that this requires a big rewrite to the code, but in the end, the rendering will look much better and more consistent with the rest of the UI.

[rfgamaral]

Today I have also noticed that most of the selected page title poor quality comes from the fact that the text is being drawn twice, one on top of the other. I couldn't fix that issue per se but I changed the code enough to see how it would look like if the title were to be drawn only once and looked much better (but not as good as a TextView render).

[protyposis]

Here's a simple fix for the issue: #48

[rfgamaral]

Just to make it clear, that fix does not exactly fix the issue here described. It's only for the "double title drawing", not for the general poor text rendering quality.

[protyposis]

It's not the perfect solution but like you already said, still much better than before... I thought it would be a good temporary solution until the control has been rewritten to use TextViews.

[rfgamaral]

Yes, but that's just for the selected title, the other ones don't have this "double drawing" problem.

But this is just a feature request to rewrite the control with TextViews, @JakeWharton hasn't pitched in yet so we don't know what he feels about such rewrite...

[JakeWharton]

See #34 for my view on the subject :)

[protyposis]

Alright. For people in need of a quick fix it might still be helpful ;)

[JakeWharton]

Agreed. Will merge tonight and probably release as well. I want to get this out before sweeping changes start happening.

[rfgamaral]

Didn't notice #34, sorry...

I guess this issue can be closed then?

[JakeWharton]

Closed... but not dead.