Combining image and text within a button in kivy - kivy

Question

What's the preferred way to combine an image/icon and text within a button? For example, how would you create a button with text = 'my button', and a graphical icon to the left of that text?

Answer 1

Regarding to question #2.
The way Kivy works is embedding Widget instances. Since Image and Button are subclasses of Widget, then all you have to do is embed an Image inside a the Button. Notice that the positioning inside a widget is fixed. You have to give explicit coordinates.
That said, you can always embed a Layout to organize the stuff you are putting inside the Button.
Here is the simple ex
from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.boxlayout import BoxLayout
from kivy.lang import Builder
Builder.load_string("""
<ButtonsApp>:
orientation: "vertical"
Button:
text: "B1"
Image:
source: 'kivy.png'
y: self.parent.y + self.parent.height - 200
x: self.parent.x
Label:
text: "A label"
""")
class ButtonsApp(App, BoxLayout):
def build(self):
return self
if __name__ == "__main__":
ButtonsApp().run()
EDIT: An example of how a relative layout can be embedded inside a button
In this case I am using a StackLayout to organize an Image and a Label inside. As I said, Button is a Widget and Kivy works embedding widgets inside widgets. It doesn't matter if they are labels, buttons or layouts.
from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.boxlayout import BoxLayout
from kivy.lang import Builder
Builder.load_string("""
<ButtonsApp>:
orientation: "vertical"
Button:
StackLayout:
pos: self.parent.pos
size: self.parent.size
orientation: 'lr-tb'
Image:
source: 'kivy.png'
size_hint_x: None
width: 74
Label:
size_hint_x: None
width: 100
text: "The text"
Label:
text: "A label"
""")
class ButtonsApp(App, BoxLayout):
def build(self):
return self
if __name__ == "__main__":
ButtonsApp().run()

Answer 2

Meanwhile, there is another way.
You can use icon fonts such as Font Awesome and combine them with text.
Either import the font directly and wrap the text in their font tag, or simply use some of the libraries that take care of that.
#: import icon ...
Button:
markup: True
text: "%s Comment" % icon('comment', 32)
size_hint_x: None
width: 100
Kivy-iconfonts converts css/tff combinations that are distributed for web sites into a json format that it loads during runtime using the import statement as shown in the example above.
I extended this in my fork to fetch Font Awesome icons during runtime and put them into the working directory of your application. That gives you the advantage of not having to distribute the fonts with the application.

Answer 3

Define a new Button class or modify the one in Kivy.uix.button
class MyButton(Button):
#add these three properties in the class
icon = ObjectProperty(None)
icon_size = (0,0)
icon_padding = NumericProperty(0) #Enter any default value like 50 if you will
#always use an icon, or specify this field
#while creating the button
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
#no changes here, just for reference
return super(MyButton, self).__init__(**kwargs)
KV file:
<MyButton>:
state_image: self.background_normal if self.state == 'normal' else self.background_down
disabled_image: self.background_disabled_normal if self.state == 'normal' else self.background_disabled_down
canvas:
Color:
rgba: self.background_color
BorderImage:
border: self.border
pos: self.pos
size: self.size
source: self.disabled_image if self.disabled else self.state_image
Color:
rgba: (1, 1, 1, 1) if root.icon != None else (1,1,1,0)
Rectangle:
source: root.icon
size: (self.texture_size[1],self.texture_size[1]) if self.icon_size == (0,0) else self.icon_size
pos: int(self.center_x - self.texture_size[0] / 2.)-dp(root.icon_padding), int(self.center_y - self.texture_size[1] / 2.)
Color:
rgba: 1, 1, 1, 1
Rectangle:
texture: self.texture
size: self.texture_size
pos: int(self.center_x - self.texture_size[0] / 2.)+dp(root.icon_padding), int(self.center_y - self.texture_size[1] / 2.)
Now just create a button widget
MyButton(text = 'Hello',icon = 'icon.png', icon_padding = 50)