Custom NSButton drawing messes up text rendering

Question

I'm subclassing NSButton / NSButtonCell and everything works fine, but at least in Retina drawing as soon as I implement any of the drawing functions in either NSButton or NSButtonCell, the text rendering changes no matter whether I do some custom text drawing or delegate straight to the super implementation.

As you can see the text goes much thinner with just the anti-aliasing changing.

When I examine this in Xcode's Reveal-rip off, I see that the text is embedded in a NSButtonTextField when none of the drawing methods are overridden. As soon as any of the drawing methods are overridden, the NSButtonTextField disappears.

None of this happens when I insert a background layer behind the button text and set

button.isBorderd = false

but I don't much like that solution.

Is there any way of getting the same "fat" text rendering without messing with layers? Perhaps an attributed string attribute, a special text drawing command, anything?

Any help would be appreciated/

adam.wulf adam.wulf · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-02T02:06:10

I wasn't able to reproduce your work-around with a background layer, though I might've been doing it wrong.

I ended up adding an NSTextField as a subview to the button, with the following attributes:

_titleTextField = [[NSTextField alloc] initWithFrame:NSZeroRect];
[_titleTextField setBordered:NO];
[_titleTextField setDrawsBackground:NO];
[_titleTextField setFont:[NSFont systemFontOfSize:13]];
[_titleTextField setTextColor:[FantasticalColors color:@"dimLabelTextColor"]];
[_titleTextField setStringValue:[self title]];
[_titleTextField setEditable:NO];
[_titleTextField setFocusRingType:NSFocusRingTypeNone];
[self addSubview:_titleTextField];

Then I was able to render all non-text in my cell's drawRect, and then let the text field render the text. Also not ideal, but was the only way I was able to match font rendering.

Custom NSButton drawing messes up text rendering

2 Answers