Text Display Jumping Left-Right due to character width difference

Question

I am using an EditText to display text received from a serial port which is updated 10 times a second, it works fine but one of the lines of text has a character that alternates beyween a digit and a dash (-). Becuase the dash is narrower than the digit the rest of the line of text after this character jumps right-left as the digit and dash alternate.

How can I prevent this so either the digit or dash could be displayed without the rest of the line jumping?

TIA

Answer 1

You should use monospace font. You can either change it with the visual designer or by code:

EditText1.Typeface = Typeface.MONOSPACE

Visual designer:

Answer 2

You then should probably use monospace font:

<EditText android:typeface="monospace" [rest of attributes] />