Hi all, How can I display and edit text with multiple colors on iOS?
I looked into this months ago and got nowhere, but I've since noticed several iOS apps doing it. Even Apple's Mail app allows you to edit multi-colored text in a reply. So there must be a way I'm missing. What I know: 1. UITextView (on iOS) is editable but will only show all the text in one color. NSTextView (on Mac OS X) does provide multiple color text editing. 2. UIWebView can display multi-colored text but is not editable. UIWebView's text metrics seem very similar to UITextView (ie if you ut the same text in both, the line spacings are the same and the character spacings are nearly the same). 3. iOS 3.2 and above state that they provides NSAttributedString support. You can fiddle around to get multiple colors in the objects, but there's still no way to actually display the colored text (which makes the NSAttributedString support seem worthless). 4. I can dive down into CoreText routines to render my own text using low level C calls. The coding is relatively complex and the result is not pretty. I got so far as displaying the multiple colored text, but it uses different metrics to UIWebView and UITextView. Most importantly, it doesn't support text editing. 5. I can display the multi-colored text in a UIWebView and overlay it with the same text in a UITextView, with the alpha set very low so it's practically invisible. When the user taps on the colored text, my UITextView receives the tap, changes alpha to 1.0, covering the UIWebView. The text appears to change from colored to black while the user edits. When they finish editing, the UITextView goes invisible again, the UIWebView updates its contents, so it appears to switch back from editing black to displaying colored. It works well, but I'd obviously prefer editable colored text. Any ideas? Is anything I've said above incorrect? As an example, one of my projects displays syntax coloring for SQL. Here are some very rough screenshots: http://www.databare.com/trace.html http://www.databare.com/column_trigger.html Thanks, Tom BareFeetWare _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
