I hope this is a really simple question, but it's stumped me. Basically, I have a huge amount of text that I'm using the text view for. For the most part, it's just the system font. However, I would like to format "headers" every few paragraphs in the large chunk of text with a custom font (that I've added to my project) and background color. How do I target small pieces of text within the text view?
If it were just a small piece of text, I would just add a label and do it with code, but since this a huge piece of text, what's the best way to do it?
Thanks!
If you load a large amount of static text with formatting, I suggest you save it as a html file and load it into UIWebView.
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Currently I am working on iOS client for web-chat. Thus chat messages have HTML tags (bold, italic, underlined, font color, images (smiles), etc.). For example:
<b>bold</b> <i>italic</i> <!--smile:bird--><img style="vertical-align: middle;border: none;" alt="bird" src="http://www.site.com/engine/data/emo_chat/bird.gif" /><!--/smile--> ordinaty text
For the moment I have 2 ideas how to display messages:
Add UIWebView to tables cell. But I think that it's not an option, because we will have a lot of messages and a lot of WebViews.
Add UITextView to tables cell, parse HTML tags and make necessary changes to attributed string. But UITextView doesn't support images (if I am right).
Is there any other (better) way to display such data (styled text + images)?
Using a webview per-cell is not going to work as you suspect. Webviews take a noticeable time to render which means you will likely end up with old webview content being momentarily displayed in reused cells until the new content renders. Webview is also a pretty heavy-weight UI element and you will encounter performance issues with having many of them on the screen updating at once.
You will want to parse the HTML text you are given into an attributed string using a library like DTCoreText. From here, if you can target iOS 6 or later you can set the attributedText property on a standard UILabel. If you need to target earlier iOS versions you can again use DTCoreText, specifically the DTAttributedLabel or DTAttributedTextCell components.
The parsing and NSAttributedString rendering can all be done manually using an XML parser and CoreText, but DTCoreText will make your life much easier.
Update: You mentioned in a comment that you want support for <img/>. DTCoreText does have some basic image support, but this is a really hard problem if you are rendering text with CoreText because you have to make text flow around the image correctly, and reserve some space in the core text renderer to put your image into. If there is just a single image for each cell, I would suggest you manually extract the image path/url and lay it out with a UIImageView alongside your text.
You can get idea from RTLabel stuff. It is doing same thing which you want.
You can also convert HTML to NSAttributedString with native iOS classes. Look the following post
https://stackoverflow.com/a/18886718/1760527
I have about twenty UITextViews and corresponding .txt files. What I want is to make each UITextView take the contents of the corresponding file and display it.
Moreover, the text is formatted and it contains some formulas (copy/pasted from Grapher). I've heard about displaying formatted text in UIWebView, but I haven't found a clear explanation anywhere.
Thanks in advance!
Text files normally don't contain formatted text.
If by "formatted" you mean "html" then yes, you will want to use UIWebView. Basically you will convert the text to an HTML document, and then use the web view to display that document. There are several example projects available from Apple that show you how to use UIWebView.
Displaying formula in a UITextView will be difficult as the character rules for formula are completely different from language text. You could generate HTML to display it that but that is difficult as well.
I think your best bet would be to draw the formula to an image and then display the image. That is the traditional way to handle the display of formula.
I am trying to create a textview with predefined height that will contain justified text.
When entering the text into the view, I need to be able to check when the view is full.
How would I do this? Core Text?
I am using sdk-3.2.
You cannot do it using UITextView (that would be the most "logical" way to do it), or any others SDK current classes.
The only simple way to do it if to put the content to be justified in an html file, justify it using CSS, and show it in a UIWebView.
im having problems with formatting for a UITextView. my app pulls in XML, saves some of it to a string , and then displays the text in a UITextView.
it understands if you put a return in there, and it starts a new line. but i want to put paragraphs in there, any idea how i can pass that information without doing multiple UITextViews
Thanks :)
If you are converting to text from XML content, then it is probably easier to use a UIWebView and format using html.
If you want total control of formatting, then you need to move to using Core Text (3.2/iPad).
I am trying to custom render text within a UITableViewCell. This text can be over a number of lines and can contain http links, font and colour changes. I have looked at the sizeWithFont methods of NSString, but can't really work out a good way of rendering each part of the string so that it all runs together correctly.
Do I need to render each word separately to get it to fit properly, or is there a better way?
can you just generate appropriate HTML and render the whole thing with a UIWebView?