How do you draw text in a custom view using Objective-C?

11
votes

I've figured out how to use the NSBezierPath class to draw shapes in the drawRect function of my custom view class, however I can't seem to figure out how to draw text. The following code is what I have so far for drawing the text (located in the drawRect function):

NSText *text = [NSText new];
[text setTextColor: [NSColor yellowColor]];
[text setText: @"Hello!"];

I'm guessing that I may need to supply an NSRect or NSPoint to tell the NSText object where to draw itself, but I can't find anything in the Cocoa documentation about how to do this.

2
objective-ccocoa

2 Answers

23
votes

You could try something along these lines:

//note we are using the convenience method, so we don't need to autorelease the object
NSDictionary *attributes = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:[NSFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica" size:26], NSFontAttributeName,[NSColor blackColor], NSForegroundColorAttributeName, nil];

NSAttributedString * currentText=[[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:@"Cat" attributes: attributes];

NSSize attrSize = [currentText size];
[currentText drawAtPoint:NSMakePoint(yourX, yourY)];
2
votes

NSText is a view (specifically, the superclass of NSTextView).

There are several ways to draw text, with and without attributes (fonts, colors, paragraph styles, etc.). See AppKit's additions to NSString and to NSAttributedString.