Here’s a little tool I wrote for handling 9patch images called 9tool. If you work with (a lot) of nine patch files in Android, you might find it handy too.

  • My workflow currently is something like this:
  • Get the xhdpi asset and make it a nine patch using draw9patch
  • Get the other states for the asset and do a 9tool copy on it to copy the nine patch area to those assets, then load those in draw9patch for some touch ups.
  • Now get the other assets for other dpis. 9tool copy the patches I made from the xhdpi assets to the other dpi variants, touch up using draw9patch again.

This saves me a bunch of manual drawing in draw9patch and makes me a happy camper!

The code is open source and as much in the public domain as it can be, so do with it what you like. I’ve only spent a couple of hours on it so there might be many bugs and it might be a bit messy. So far I haven’t lost any 9patches in the process though ;)

There’s a zipped build in the downloads section if you don’t want to build from source.

The tool is hosted on bitbucket here: https://bitbucket.org/hvisser/9tool