What's the difference between lineSpacingExtra and lineSpacingMultiplier?

Question

I'm adding line spacing in my textview which spans multiple lines. What's the difference between android:lineSpacingExtra and android:lineSpacingMultiplier?

lineSpacingExtra with 2dp worked fine for me but I was wondering what the Multiplier does instead?

Jans · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-24T21:01:40.660

61

The difference is that android:lineSpacingExtra add extra spacing between lines of text of TextView and android:lineSpacingMultiplier work as scale factor for height of line space. in other words, each line height will be height*multiplier + extra

edited May 24 '16 at 21:01

answered Oct 08 '13 at 18:42

Jans

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Height of what ? The text-font? Meaning text-size? This is useful in case the TextView changes its text-size? – android developer May 20 '20 at 07:20
`android:lineSpacingExtra` takes floating number of format dp,sp,px,mm,in – yajnesh Jul 16 '20 at 09:44

score 16 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 18:43

It's rather simple: one is additive and one is multiplicative.

If you have a default line spacing of LINE_SPACING and use:

float x = 2;
float y = 1.5;
setLineSpacing(x, y);

The resulting line spacing will be 1.5*LINE_SPACING + 2

It is important to note that the multiplication happens first! This follows the conventional order of operations (multiplication before addition).

See the docs here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextView.html#setLineSpacing(float, float)

In the future, it might be wise to look up such documentation first. ;)

What's the difference between lineSpacingExtra and lineSpacingMultiplier?

2 Answers2