public abstract class Attribute
extends Boxed

A (single) specific formatting or font to be applied to a range of Text.

Examples of setting up Attributes include:

 attr = new StyleAttribute(Style.ITALIC);
 

although many settings can be compounded by setting a FontDescription:

 desc = new FontDescription("DejaVu Serif, 9pt");
 attr = new FontDescriptionAttribute(desc);
 

in general it's one Attribute per characteristic. You then aggregate these together in an AttributeList and then apply them to a Layout. See AttributeList for an example of using these on discrete parts of text.

WARNING:
When coding with Attributes be aware of the following restrictions:

• Once you have assigned an Attribute to a specific range of text in a given Layout you must not attempt to reuse it.
• Once you have inserted an Attribute into an AttributeList it is "consumed" by that list and you must not attempt to reuse it.

The different text attribute manipulations you can do are analogous to those found on FontDescription and TextTag. Indeed, Pango's Attributes are the underlying mechanism powering TextView and Label's rendering of rich markup.

Pango Attributes have an internal ugliness which is that each one needs to be told the offsets of text it applies to. The problem is that these are in terms of UTF-8 bytes, which not something we have access to from Java (nor would we want to expose such in our public API). We take care of setting the start and end points properly when you call setAttributes(), but you have to have already set the text into the Layout for us to be able to do so, obviously.