android:drawableLeft margin and/or padding

As cephus mentioned android:drawablePadding will only force padding between the text and the drawable if the button is small enough.

When laying out larger buttons you can use android:drawablePadding in conjunction with android:paddingLeft and android:paddingRight to force the text and drawable inward towards the center of the button. By adjusting the left and right padding separately you can make very detailed adjustments to the layout.

Here's an example button that uses padding to push the text and icon closer together than they would be by default:

<Button android:text="@string/button_label"     android:id="@+id/buttonId"    android:layout_width="160dip"    android:layout_height="60dip"    android:layout_gravity="center"    android:textSize="13dip"    android:drawableLeft="@drawable/button_icon"    android:drawablePadding="2dip"    android:paddingLeft="30dip"    android:paddingRight="26dip"    android:singleLine="true"    android:gravity="center" />  

TextView has an android:drawablePadding property which should do the trick:

android:drawablePadding

The padding between the drawables and the text.

Must be a dimension value, which is a floating point number appended with a unit such as "14.5sp". Available units are: px (pixels), dp (density-independent pixels), sp (scaled pixels based on preferred font size), in (inches), mm (millimeters).

This may also be a reference to a resource (in the form "@[package:]type:name") or theme attribute (in the form "?[package:][type:]name") containing a value of this type.

This corresponds to the global attribute resource symbol drawablePadding.

android:drawablePadding will only create a padding gap between the text and the drawable if the button is small enough to squish the 2 together. If your button is wider than the combined width (for drawableLeft/drawableRight) or height (for drawableTop/drawableBottom) then drawablePadding doesn't do anything.

I'm struggling with this right now as well. My buttons are quite wide, and the icon is hanging on the left edge of the button and the text is centered in the middle. My only way to get around this for now has been to bake in a margin on the drawable by adding blank pixels to the left edge of the canvas with photoshop. Not ideal, and not really recommended either. But thats my stop-gap solution for now, short of rebuilding TextView/Button.