Style paragraph

This page describes how you can style text for your paragraph. To set paragraph-level styling, you can configure parameters like textAlign and lineHeight or define your own ParagraphStyle.

Set text alignment

The textAlign parameter lets you set the horizontal alignment of the text within a Text composable surface area.

By default, Text will select the natural text alignment depending on its content value:

  • Left edge of the Text container for left-to-right alphabets such as Latin, Cyrillic, or Hangul
  • Right edge of the Text container for right-to-left alphabets such as Arabic or Hebrew

@Composable
fun CenterText() {
    Text(
        "Hello World", textAlign = TextAlign.Center, modifier = Modifier.width(150.dp)
    )
}
TextSnippets.kt

The words

If you want to manually set the text alignment of a Text composable, prefer using TextAlign.Start and TextAlign.End instead of TextAlign.Left and TextAlign.Right respectively, as they resolve to the right edge of the Text composable depending on the preferred language text orientation. For example, TextAlign.End aligns to the right side for French text and to the left side for Arabic text, but TextAlign.Right aligns to the right side no matter what alphabet is used.

Add multiple styles in a paragraph

To add multiple styles in a paragraph, you can use ParagraphStyle in an AnnotatedString, which can be annotated with styles of arbitrary annotations. Once a portion of your text is marked with a ParagraphStyle, that portion is separated from the remaining text as if it had line feeds at the beginning and end.

For more information about adding multiple styles in a text, see Add multiple styles in text.

AnnotatedString has a type-safe builder to make it easier to create: buildAnnotatedString. The following snippet uses buildAnnotatedString to set ParagraphStyle:

@Composable
fun ParagraphStyle() {
    Text(
        buildAnnotatedString {
            withStyle(style = ParagraphStyle(lineHeight = 30.sp)) {
                withStyle(style = SpanStyle(color = Color.Blue)) {
                    append("Hello\n")
                }
                withStyle(
                    style = SpanStyle(
                        fontWeight = FontWeight.Bold, color = Color.Red
                    )
                ) {
                    append("World\n")
                }
                append("Compose")
            }
        }
    )
}
TextSnippets.kt

Three paragraphs in three different styles: Blue, red and bold, and plain black

Adjust line height and padding

includeFontPadding is a legacy property that adds extra padding based on font metrics at the top of the first line and bottom of the last line of a text. In Compose 1.2.0, includeFontPadding is set to true by default.

We now recommend setting includeFontPadding to false (which will remove the extra padding) using the deprecated API PlatformTextStyle from Compose 1.2.0, and adjust your text further.

The ability to configure lineHeight is not new– it has been available since Android Q. You can configure lineHeight for Text using the lineHeight parameter, which distributes the line height in each line of text. You can then use the new LineHeightStyle API to further configure how this text is aligned within the space, and remove whitespace.

You may want to adjust lineHeight using the text unit “em” (relative font size) instead of “sp” (scaled pixels) for improved precision. For more information about selecting an appropriate text unit, see TextUnit.

Image showing lineHeight as a measurement based on the lines directly above and below it.
Figure 1. Use Alignment and Trim to adjust the text within the set lineHeight, and trim extra space if needed.

Text(
    text = text,
    style = LocalTextStyle.current.merge(
        TextStyle(
            lineHeight = 2.5.em,
            platformStyle = PlatformTextStyle(
                includeFontPadding = false
            ),
            lineHeightStyle = LineHeightStyle(
                alignment = LineHeightStyle.Alignment.Center,
                trim = LineHeightStyle.Trim.None
            )
        )
    )
)
TextSnippets.kt

In addition to adjusting lineHeight, you can now further center and style text using configurations with the LineHeightStyle experimental API: LineHeightStyle.Alignment and LineHeightStyle.Trim (includeFontPadding must be set to false for Trim to work). Alignment and Trim use the measured space in between lines of text to more appropriately distribute it to all lines– including a single line of text and the top line of a block of text.

LineHeightStyle.Alignment defines how to align the line in the space provided by the line height. Within each line, you can align the text to the top, bottom, center, or proportionally. LineHeightStyle.Trim then allows you to leave or remove the extra space to the top of the first line and bottom of the last line of your text, generated from any lineHeight and Alignment adjustments. The following samples show how multi-line text looks with various LineHeightStyle.Trim configurations when alignment is centered (LineHeightStyle.Alignment.Center).

An image demonstrating LineHeightStyle.Trim.None An image demonstrating LineHeightStyle.Trim.Both
LineHeightStyle.Trim.None LineHeightStyle.Trim.Both
An image demonstrating LineHeightStyle.Trim.FirstLineTop An image demonstrating LineHeightStyle.Trim.LastLineBottom
LineHeightStyle.Trim.FirstLineTop LineHeightStyle.Trim.LastLineBottom

See the Fixing Font Padding in Compose Text blog post to learn more about the context of this change, how includeFontPadding worked in the View system, and the changes made for Compose and the new LineHeightStyle APIs.