CoreText for the rest of us
Simple CoreText abstraction layer inspired by TextKit. Stacks multiple strings on top of each other and shows them in a view or manually in a drawRect: implementation. Need to draw a lot of text (like for a certain watch?) this might come in handy.
Consisting of two main objects PINCHTextLayout and PINCHTextRenderer, this little framework should make it a lot easier to draw a stack of strings onto the screen, each with their own attributes. The framework adds some functionality needed for our own projects (like underline clipping) but is designed to be as generic as possible. As shown in the screenshot, wrapping the layouts around a rect is no problem as well.
The rendering of the layout objects can be done with PINCHTextView, the UILabel-like PINCHTextLabel or manually drawn in your drawRect: implementation. Setting debugRendering to YES in the textView shows where each layout and each seperate line is drawn:
To run the example project, clone the repo, and run pod install from the Example directory first.
To get the most basic layout on screen, try the following
PINCHTextLayout *layout = [[PINCHTextLayout alloc] initWithString:@"Hello world!" attributes:@{PINCHTextLayoutFontAttribute: [UIFont systemFontOfSize:17]} name:@"hello"];
PINCHTextView *textView = [[PINCHTextView alloc] initWithFrame:self.view.bounds textLayouts:@[layout]];
[self.view addSubview:textView];To draw the layout in a context (like from a drawRect:), the following might set you in the right path:
PINCHTextRenderer *renderer = [[PINCHTextRenderer alloc] init];
renderer.textLayouts = @[layout];
[renderer renderTextLayoutsInContext:context withRect:rect];Adding a rect to wrap the layouts around is not a problem at all
CGRect clipRect = CGRectMake(10, 50, 100, 100);
self.textView.renderer.clippingRect = clipRect;In the provided example app, tapping the screen and moving the touch around adds a clipping rect to the textView.
The PINCHTextRenderer instance will update you with its progress via the PINCHTextRendererDelegate protocol. This enables you to draw additional graphics behind, over, or around the rendered layouts. With the delegate method described below it should for example be possible to draw a container behind the layouts:
- (void)textRenderer:(PINCHTextRenderer *)textRenderer willRenderTextLayouts:(NSArray *)textLayouts inBoundingRect:(CGRect)rect withContext:(CGContextRef)context;PINCHTextRendering should work on iOS 6 and above, though iOS 5 support might be possible if all NSAttributedString attributes are replaced by their CoreText counterparts. This didn't seem necessary at the time of creating.
PINCHTextRendering is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:
pod "PINCHTextRendering"
Adding the following import to your files gives you access to the most used classes
#import <PINCHTextRendering/PINCHTextRendering.h>Pim Coumans, pim.coumans@justpinch.com
PINCHTextRendering is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.