How do I specify eg. Roboto-Medium or Roboto-Black in styles.xml

On Android 5.0 you can set Roboto Medium with sans-serif-medium.

This solution, taken from Google iosched 2014, uses sans-serif on Android pre-v21:

values/styles.xml

<style name="MyStyle">
    <item name="android:fontFamily">@string/font_fontFamily_medium</item>
</style>

values/fonts.xml

<string name="font_fontFamily_medium">sans-serif</string>

values-v21/fonts.xml

<string name="font_fontFamily_medium">sans-serif-medium</string>

NEW SOLUTION

After Google I/O '17 you can create multiple font family in res/font folder

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<font-family xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">
<font
    app:font="@font/roboto_light"
    app:fontStyle="normal"
    app:fontWeight="300" />
<font
    app:font="@font/roboto_bold"
    app:fontStyle="normal"
    app:fontWeight="700" />

</font-family>

and you can use wherever want

 <style name="AppTheme.DefaultTextView" parent="android:style/Widget.TextView">
    <item name="android:textColor">@color/colorBlack</item>
    <item name="android:fontFamily">@font/font_family_roboto</item>
</style>

font folder font family

OLD ANSWER

Thanks for Jakob Eriksson

original answer

android:fontFamily="sans-serif"           // roboto regular
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-light"     // roboto light
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-condensed" // roboto condensed
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-black"     // roboto black
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-thin"      // roboto thin (android 4.2)
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-medium"    // roboto medium (android 5.0)

in style:

<style name="AppTheme.DefaultTextView" parent="android:style/Widget.TextView">
    <item name="android:textSize">@dimen/text_view_text_size</item>
    <item name="android:textColor">@color/black</item>
    <item name="android:fontFamily">sans-serif-light</item>
    <item name="android:textStyle">normal</item>
</style>

in app theme:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/colorPrimary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/colorPrimaryDark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/gray</item>
    <item name="android:textViewStyle">@style/AppTheme.DefaultTextView</item>
</style>

Support Library 26 introduced using fonts in XML, and it's backwards compatible to Android API 14.

To add fonts as resources, perform the following steps in the Android Studio:

  1. Right-click the res folder and go to New > Android resource directory. The New Resource Directory window appears.

  2. In the Resource type list, select font, and then click OK. Note: The name of the resource directory must be font.

Figure 1. Adding the font resource directory

  1. Add your font files in the font folder. The folder structure below generates R.font.dancing_script, R.font.lobster, and R.font.typo_graphica.

Figure 2. Adding the font files in the resource directory

  1. Double-click a font file to preview the file's fonts in the editor.

Figure 3. Previewing the font file

To set a font for the TextView, in the layout XML file, set the fontFamily attribute to the font file you want to access.

<TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:fontFamily="@font/lobster"/>

The Android Studio layout preview allows you to preview the font set in the TextView.

Figure 4. Previewing fonts in layout preview

To add a font to a style, Open the styles.xml, and set the fontFamily attribute to the font file you want to access.

<style name="customfontstyle" parent="@android:style/TextAppearance.Small">
<item name="android:fontFamily">@font/lobster</item>

If you don't want to bundle the fonts in your app, you can always look into Downloadable Fonts


I suggest you to use custom libraries like Android-RobotoTextView or Calligraphy. With one of these you can set the font of a view in xml with an attribute so you can put in in styles.xml . And they works with previous version of Android than 4.0