Showing custom font or View in preview section of Android Studio XML

Question

Is there any way to view custom fonts/views in the preview section of Android Studio?

I have used font-awesome as a custom typeface

Answer 1

To make FontAwesome icons visible in Android Studio XML designer you can.

1. Create custom view
2. Apply font in constructor
3. Add custom attr if you want to set font from xml

Here is full demo code in gist

Demo img with code from comment:

Important parts: (pretty much the same as Declaring a custom android UI element using XML but with small tuning)

TextViewWithFont.java - Custom view class

import android.content.Context;
import android.content.res.TypedArray;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class TextViewWithFont extends TextView {

    public TextViewWithFont(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init(context, null, 0);
    }
    public TextViewWithFont(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        init(context, attrs, 0);
    }
    public TextViewWithFont(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        init(context, attrs, defStyle);
    }
    private void init(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        // Load attributes
        TypedArray ta = context.obtainStyledAttributes(attrs, R.styleable.TextViewPlusFont, 0, 0);
        try {
            String fontInAssets = ta.getString(R.styleable.TextViewPlusFont_customFont);
            setTypeface(Typefaces.get(context, "fonts/"+ fontInAssets));
        } finally {
            ta.recycle();
        }
    }
}

res/values/attrs.xml - Need this to use app:customFont="fontawesome-webfont.ttf"in our layout xml.

Typefaces.java - Helper class to reuse fonts (Cache for fonts)

import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Typeface;
import android.util.Log;
import java.util.Hashtable;

public class Typefaces {
    private static final String TAG = "Typefaces";

    private static final Hashtable cache = new Hashtable();

    public static Typeface get(Context c, String assetPath) {
        synchronized (cache) {
            if (!cache.containsKey(assetPath)) {
                try {
                    Typeface t = Typeface.createFromAsset(c.getAssets(),
                            assetPath);
                    cache.put(assetPath, t);
                    Log.e(TAG, "Loaded '" + assetPath);
                } catch (Exception e) {
                    Log.e(TAG, "Could not get typeface '" + assetPath
                            + "' because " + e.getMessage());
                    return null;
                }
            }
            return cache.get(assetPath);
        }
    }
}

activity_main.xml - Layout and how to use TextViewWithFont custom view