UITextView where should I set color and font for for attributed string

Question

When I use UITextView in storyboard, I can select text as attributed string and set its attributes like color, font and other attributes. And when I set textView.text = @"my string" in code it show up as I set.

My question is if I want to do this in code, what would be equivalent to this storyboard attributes setting? From document https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UITextView_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/instp/UITextView/text I see some property i.e. textColor, font, but lack of some property that I can set like line-height.

What you can do in IB, you can do it all in code. In this case, you can use attributedText property to set what you could in IB. But if you use same style across the entire text, I think it would be better to just use the basic configuration like textColor. I don't know about the line-height. But you could just set it to attributedText if you could set that in the IB. For more advance control, there is Text Kit. — yusuke024

Eike Eike · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-18T18:54:21

This is done via the attributed strings object! You should definitely have a look at the programming guide: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/AttributedStrings/AttributedStrings.html

Upon request, a short example to show how you create an attributed string.

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    //
    // Example 1: Create attributed string and set attributes for ranges
    //
    NSString *plainString = @"Hello World";
    NSMutableAttributedString *attributedString = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc] initWithString:plainString];

    // change the font of the entire string
    [attributedString addAttribute:NSFontAttributeName
                             value:[UIFont fontWithName:@"Courier New" size:16.0]
                             range:NSMakeRange(0, plainString.length)];

    // set the font color to blue for the word 'World'
    [attributedString addAttribute:NSForegroundColorAttributeName
                             value:[UIColor blueColor]
                             range:NSMakeRange(6, 4)];
    // assign to texfield 1
    self.tfAttributedString1.attributedText = attributedString;

    //
    // Example 2: Create attributed string based on html
    //
    NSString *htmlString = @"<p style='font-family:Courier New'>Hello <span style='color:blue'>html</span></p>";
    NSData *htmlStringData = [htmlString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSDictionary *attributedStringOptions = @{
                                              NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute:NSHTMLTextDocumentType,
                                              NSCharacterEncodingDocumentAttribute: @(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
                                              };
    // assign to texfield 2
    self.tfAttributedString2.attributedText = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithData:htmlStringData
                                                                               options: attributedStringOptions
                                                                    documentAttributes:nil error:nil];
}

And this is what the result will look like:

Screenshot of the result

UITextView where should I set color and font for for attributed string

1 Answers