I have a label and I wish to increase the spacing between characters.
I tried adding a space between each character, but this was too much
Perhaps there is a font with large spacing between the letters?
If all else fails, I am considering putting each character (only a size character code), into its own textbox.
Any ideas on how to achieve this?
There is a way to insert a half space, but I don't recall the exact command (option-spacebar?). Wikipedia has a complete list of spaces you can use.
Another approach would be a UIWebView with the letter-spacing CSS attribute set.
You're better off creating a custom view and using your drawRect routine to draw the text manually. You can use CFAttributedString to hold your text along with kerning information.
Update: sounds like you can't actually use CFAttributedString to draw text on the iPhone. You can still use your drawRect to draw the customized text, but it will take some more work to actually get your custom kerning to work.
Related
Is there a way to set a custom word spacing in CoreText?
I have looked around the paragraph properties where I would have expected to see this but found nothing.
I don't have deep experience in this but AFAIK you cannot adjust the space between words. So my list of possible solutions would be:
Adjust the kern value, however this will also adjust the space between letter which may not be what you want.
Add extra spaces. Crude, but you can increase the space between words by replace a single space with two.
(Really advanced) start adjusting individual glyphs. The best example I have found for doing is here: http://invasivecode.tumblr.com/core-text about 2/3rds down the author shows how to access the individual glyphs and adjust their settings.
Look at this UILabel. It's center-aligned:
Now look at this UILabel. Although it is technically center-aligned, it really doesn't look that way:
The reason why it looks like this is because the center-alignment considers the degree symbol a third character, thus bumping the other two off to the left a bit. My question is: is there any way to ignore certain characters whilst center-aligning a label?
Interesting question. The only solution that comes to mind for me is to pad the text string with spaces on the front to cancel out the ignored characters on the back.
That is, to center #"60d" as if it were #"60", set the text to #" 60d". This works well with a fixed width font, but otherwise is only a rough approximation.
If you like this idea and want to get fancy with it, then you can use NSStrings method
– stringByPaddingToLength:withString:startingAtIndex:
perhaps in conjunction with – rangeOfCharacterFromSet: or some such method to determine how many spaces to pad with.
You could of course measure the text string(s) and compute your own positioning, rather than using text alignment in a larger field.
Assuming you don't want to do that, another idea that comes to mind is to display the string “°60°” with the first character styled with a color of opacity 0 and no shadow.
I don't do iOS development so I don't know how practical these are.
I'm looking for a font which contains a graphic character which is (essentially), the space character, inverted. I'm looking for a graphic character equivalent to the largest-possible solid-black box. The closest I have been able to find is Wingings 2 character 162, but that doesn't fill the entire available character space. When I insert two consecutive Wingdings 2 162 characters, there is still appreciable whitespace between them when displayed or printed. Does anyone know of a black-box font/character which would fill all available character space?
All characters are going to have whitespace between them, or they would be unreadable. This is called "kerning". You can adjust the kerning and line-height in whatever program you are using to send the malicious fax, if you want to be sure to use the maximum amount of toner per page.
Have you considered creating your own font using a software package like this or like this? You could edit the space character to be a solid black square. But as Chris McCall mentioned, you may still have space between characters of any size due to kerning applied by the layout engine that draws the fonts.
You other option is to owner draw your own text and programmatically replacing spaces with black boxes. You would have complete control over kerning and everything else.
I don't know if this is exactly what you were looking for, but...
I was looking for the same thing, since I wanted to create a "textbox" when I wanted to write text using the spritefont, but I never knew how long the total string was going to be, so I wanted something that I could "write" in the same location right before the string with a contrasting color which could be expected to be as long as the string it needed to encompass. That being the case, try:
Webdings - character 103.
I tried lining them up and there wasn't even any space in between. Perfect.
I have two strings:
a variable length piece of text
another string with numbers that
point to a reference
In my view, the first piece of text is displayed in a UILabel, I adjust the size of the label to accomodate the size of the text. This means I cannot just place another UILabel on the screen, at least not without repositioning it...somehow.
I need to be able to put the second piece of text so it appears to be at the end of the sentence - and superscripted
I really have no idea how to achieve this!
My rather dodgy solution was to enter unicode characters for the superscripted numbers.
Not a great solution but it worked.
The simplest way would be to use two different UILabels. A better solution might be to draw both strings using -drawInRect:withFont: in a custom view's -drawRect: method.
I have a block of content (stored in XML) that I want to put in a UIScrollView. Certain parts of this text will be formatted with different fonts, sizes, and colors. Altogether, it mostly reads as a paragraph with word wrapping.
I've built my NSXMLParser code, and I have separated all the data. I'm ready to apply my decorations and add these elements as UILabels.
However, I'm looking for a solution to ease the inherent difficulties of string height/width calculations and all of that arithmetic to make these UILabels line up with word wrapping nicely. [keeping track of your last X and Y coordinates, knowing when to insert manual line breaks, how to best vertically display a line that has 2 different sized fonts]
The XML markup can easily be converted to HTML, and thus UIWebView, but I hear that is slower to load.
Is the UIWebView going to be the best class for this? I wish there were one that did all of this with UILabels so that I can use these elements for touch events. (I assume that I cannot use an HTML element to trigger a touch event.)
You should probably a UIWebView. You can use an HTML anchor for touchable elements. The delegate will give you the option of doing something other than loading a web-page when the user touches the element. You can use a made-up URL format to uniquely identify each element.
Aside from that, you may want to use a custom control that draws all the text, rather than a series of UILabels. The UILabels will probably make it difficult to do line wrapping.