# Android drawables and buttons

## Introduction

Android icons are called drawables. They need to be drawn in multiple sizes for multiple screen resolutions (DPI).

The standard screen resolutions defined by Android are:

- ldpi (120dpi)
- mdpi (160dpi)
- hdpi (240dpi)
- xhdpi (320dpi)
- xxhdpi (480dpi)
- xxxhdpi (640dpi)

Android also supports 9-patch images which have fixed and expandable parts so they can be scaled nicely to any size. These images are used as background for views such as buttons.

## Creating an Android drawable

1. Open a graphic document.
2. Should it have multiple pages or frames, select the page and frame you want to use.
3. Choose the menu item Icon | Create Android drawable from image.
4. Input the DPI for the source image.
5. Put a check into the boxes corresponding to the resolutions you want to create.
6. Click OK.

The resulting document will have multiple pages. Each page will have a DPI value set to the corresponding standard Android screen DPI value. It is recommended to save this document somewhere as a .gfie document to preserve pages and DPI information.

The final step is to export the pages to the resource folder of your Android project. Choose File | Export Android drawable. Here you have to provide the resource folder, i.e. the parent folder of the `drawable-*` directories.

Each page will be exported to the corresponding subfolder (`drawable-ldpi`, `drawable-mdpi`, etc.). The exported files will be named [title].png where [title] is what you input to the Android resource identifier field.

## Testing a 9-patch image

See ninepatch.gfie under the GFIE Samples directory for an example 9-patch image.

Choose Icon | Test (Ctrl+Shift+T) and select the 9-patch tab to view your 9-patch image scaled to various sizes.

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