9-Patch Images
Remarks#
A 9-patch image file is a specially formatted file so that Android knows which areas/portions of the image can or cannot be scaled. It breaks your image into a 3x3 grid. The corners remain unscaled, the sides are scaled in one direction and the center is scaled in both dimensions.
A Nine Patch (9-Patch) image is a bitmap that has a single pixel wide border around the entire image. Ignoring the 4 pixels in the corners of the image. This border provides metadata for the bitmap itself. Bounds are marked by solid black line(s).
A Nine Patch image is stored with the extension .9.png.
The top border indicates areas that stretch horizontally. The left border indicates areas that stretch vertically.
The bottom border indicates padding horizontally. The right border indicates padding vertically.
The padding borders are usually used to determine where text is to be drawn.
There is an excellent tool provided by Google that greatly simplifies the creation of these files.
Located in the Android SDK: android-sdk\tools\lib\draw9patch.jar
Basic rounded corners
The key to correctly stretching is in the top and left border.
The top border controls horizontal stretching and the left border controls vertical stretching.
This example creates rounded corners suitable for a Toast.
The parts of the image that are below the top border and to the right of the left border will expand to fill all unused space.
This example will stretch to all combinations of sizes, as shown below:
Basic spinner
The Spinner can be reskinned according to your own style requirements using a Nine Patch.
As an example, see this Nine Patch:
As you can see, it has 3 extremely small areas of stretching marked.
The top border has only left of the icon marked. That indicates that I want the left side (complete transparency) of the drawable to fill the Spinner view until the icon is reached.
The left border has marked transparent segments at the top and bottom of the icon marked. That indicates that both the top and the bottom will expand to the size of the Spinner view. This will leave the icon itself centered vertically.
Using the image without Nine Patch metadata:
Using the image with Nine Patch metadata:
Optional padding lines
Nine-patch images allow optional definition of the padding lines in the image. The padding lines are the lines on the right and at the bottom.
If a View sets the 9-patch image as its background, the padding lines are used to define the space for the View’s content (e.g. the text input in an EditText). If the padding lines are not defined, the left and top lines are used instead.
The content area of the stretched image then looks like this:
