Android - Spacing between CheckBox and text

Question

Is there an easy way to add padding between the checkbox in a CheckBox control, and the associated text?

I cannot just add leading spaces, because my label is multi-line.

As-is, the text is way too close to the checkbox:

Answer 1

Yes, you can add padding by adding padding.

android:padding=5dp

Answer 2

<CheckBox
        android:paddingRight="12dip" />

Answer 3

I hate to answer my own question, but in this case I think I need to. After checking it out, @Falmarri was on the right track with his answer. The problem is that Android's CheckBox control already uses the android:paddingLeft property to get the text where it is.

The red line shows the paddingLeft offset value of the entire CheckBox

If I just override that padding in my XML layout, it messes up the layout. Here's what setting paddingLeft="0" does:

Turns out you can't fix this in XML. You have do it in code. Here's my snippet with a hardcoded padding increase of 10dp.

final float scale = this.getResources().getDisplayMetrics().density;
checkBox.setPadding(checkBox.getPaddingLeft() + (int)(10.0f * scale + 0.5f),
        checkBox.getPaddingTop(),
        checkBox.getPaddingRight(),
        checkBox.getPaddingBottom());

This gives you the following, where the green line is the increase in padding. This is safer than hardcoding a value, since different devices could use different drawables for the checkbox.