Local icons in Android Options Menu stretch to fill menu item, obscure Title

Question

I'm new, so links and images are here

Hi,

I'm likely making a silly mistake... hoping to find out what that is.

I'd like to use a few of the standard menu icons (ic_menu_refresh, etc.) in my app's Options Menu. And I'd like to set the icons in the xml file for the menu. I read in a few places that I can use the following:

<item android:id="@+id/quit"
      android:icon="@android:drawable/ic_menu_close_clear_cancel"
      android:title="Quit" />

to make a quit button in my menu. And this works nicely. However, I'd also like to use some other icons, like ic_menu_stop.png, which are apparently "not public" [link1]. Also, I've read in a few places that it's not a great idea to "reference internal graphics like that" [link2]. Likewise, I don't want to use the asterisk workaround [link3] to allow access to private resources. The solution offered is to make a local copy of the drawables.

So I copied the image files I wanted from C:\...\android-8\data\res\drawable-hdpi into my project's res\drawable folder, and then changed the above xml to:

<item android:id="@+id/quit"
      android:icon="@drawable/ic_menu_close_clear_cancel"
      android:title="Quit" />

However, this causes the icon to stretch (I believe the icon is stretched - and not simply a bigger (hdpi) image file - because it's slightly blurred) and either obscure or crowd out the title text, so all I see is the oversized, blurry icon. Of course, I also tried copying the icon from the drawable-mdpi folder: using the mdpi icon doesn't obscure the title, but the icon is slighlty undersized and blurry.

I wanted a screenshot, so I switched to running the app on my emulator. However, the blurring isn't apparent, and the local mdpi image seems to match the internal one I'm referencing:

[screenshot] (follow the link at the top!)

I have double-checked :), and it really is blurred on my phone (Motorola Droid).

It also occurred to me that the referenced one might be getting the icon via an xml file (like a state-list drawable), and that the xml file somehow defined how the image was to be drawn. I tried making one with a bitmap element, and tried setting a couple of the properties in ways I thought might help:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<bitmap xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" 
 android:src="@drawable/ic_menu_close_clear_cancel"
 android:gravity="top"
 android:filter="false" />

It worked to display the icon (I was proud of myself), but didn't affect the stretching issue.

I also found these [link4 and link5] pages, but they seemed to have different issues.

Perhaps I should be copying the icons from another location? Am I on the right track with the xml file? Help?

Thanks,

Nolan

Answer 1

If you want to have the icon appear correctly in all screen densities, then you should create your own drawable-mdpi, drawable-hdpi, etc folders and copy the icons into each of those.

That way the correct size icon will be used for each density. For more details on how this works, see supporting multiple screen sizes, particularly the section on resource qualifiers.