I love the San Francisco font. And would like to use it if possible. I have a table view that shows a series of labels where each label is 6 hexadecimal digits, e.g.
F0:1A:2B
12:CE:88
The problem is that they don't line up nicely. I can enable the monospaced digits attribute for the font, but that doesn't account for the characters ABCDEF. I've tried the single monospace font (Menlo) and it looks terrible and out of place.
I'm toying with making 8 little labels one for each character (6 hex digits plus the two : separators), which seems like a huge kludge. Is there no other way. I wondered if there was a way to do something with AttributedString to get the hex digits to be same width?
If you want to use a proportionally spaced font, you'll have to draw the characters at the appropriate places. Otherwise, find a monospaced font you like.
For completeness sake, I should post what I ended up doing after accepting what #AaronBratcher confirmed.
First I created 5 separate UILabels for the following elements:
leftTwoDigits-leftSeparator-centerTwoDigits-rightSeparator-rightTwoDigits
I used constrains to constrain all of their baselines, and have 0 horizontal spacing betwixt each. The separator labels were set simply to : and normal color. The xxxTwoDigits labels were given the string AA. A is NOT the widest character, C is. But A is near it. C is too wide, and A is wide enough. The color of these labels was set to clear so it doesn't actually show up.
Then 6 more UILabels are added. Again the the same baselines. The first two are constrained to the leading and trailing sides of leftTwoDigits and constrained to match in width. Repeat for the other 4 cells. Make all centered. And populate them individually with the individual digits.
Related
I noticed that UILabel doesn't wrap words fairly. It glues the last short word (10 or less characters) to the previous one and moves them together on the second line.
Check the illustration:
Label #1: There is enough room in the first line for word 'seven' (as expected).
Label #2: One more 'short' word added and word 'seven' migrated to the second line (I'd like to avoid this behaviour).
Label #3: The last word contains 10 characters and still is treated as 'short' by the Label.
Label #4: The last word contains 11 characters and is now detached from word 'seven' that goes back to the first line (as expected).
Seemingly, Apple fights with 'widows' and forces to a 'good typography' by this behaviour. But sometimes I don't need such care. So, how can I prevent UILabel from glueing last words to the previous one?
Fixed by using NSAllowsDefaultLineBreakStrategy set to false.
Most fonts on iOS/macOS are proportional and the typeface system attempt to use good typography standards. Therefore the characters and/or typography will change the spacing based on other characters around it, line length etc. To get more predictable text display, use a font that has fixed spacing like Monaco or other fixed spacing fonts. This will produce a much more predictable display.
Here is Apple's Typography guidelines to start at:
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/visual-design/typography/
For a UILabel of certain width, with certain font and font size, i want to calculate amount of characters that would make 7 lines worth of text inside it + ... (three dots showing continuation). Is there a fancier way to achieve this? Currently what i'm trying is counting up to X amount of characters or 7 new line characters, which ever comes first and i cut on the text right there.
More Detail:
Trying to make an expandable row Cell which contains the UILabel, i'm achieving this with auto layout... So to control the cell expansion, i change the text to be full text or a substring of that, with a button below which toggles between the string vs substring. All of that is working. The problem i'm getting is my method of finding the substring isnt very neat. Its not consistent on how it handles text of different combination of characters or newlines. I get variations of how it looks and sometimes it just ends with three dots on a new line rather than finishing on the 7th line.
Even using auto layout you can still use the lines property of UILabel to limit the number of lines displayed by the label.
So set it 7 and you'll get 7 or less rows. Just assign the complete text.
For example, I have the following two string: "How Munched is That Birdie in the Window?" and "S22 - E7". I want to present in the label the following: "How Munched is That Birdie in ... S22 - E7" If the string is too large according to the label's size and doesn't fit it". How you can see, the three dots are placed always in the first string, the second string is always shown full.
How can I achieve this?
Here is how to do it.
yourlabel.adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth = false
yourlabel.lineBreakMode = .byTruncatingMiddle
You can set the UILabel's ParagraphStyle LineBreakMode to byTruncatingMiddle, which will probably work in most cases with carefully planned label size. From the docs:
The line is displayed so that the beginning and end fit in the container and the missing text in the middle is indicated by an ellipsis glyph. This mode is used for single-line layout
If you want to guarantee none of the "S22 - E7" string is truncated, you would have more control using two labels and setting layout constraints such that the width of the protected label is preserved so that it can display the full string whenever possible, but that is probably overkill in most cases.
You may also find this answer helpful if decide to go a different route by manually manipulating the displayed string based on detecting how many characters will be visible given the width and font.
I have a custom UITableViewCell design as
What I want to is that "points" label should come under the last digit in my Numbers label. Lets say I have 1990 value in my Numbers label the "points" labels should come uder the last digit "0" in this case.
How can I do this?
You can add a Horizontal Space between the points label and the number label with a negative value roughly equates the width of 1 character
For instance here:
Here in this example the horizontal space is -30 while the font size of the number label is 61pt. You can see that it is roughly one character width. (Of course you can apply more complicated math if you please to get the exact value you desire or accommodates your design principle)
And with making sure that the number label does not have an explicit width constrain it will automatically expand to fit its contents and therefore pushing the points label appropriately.
like this:
I would like to align the start of the text of two UILabels. I aligned the two UILabels (with the yellow and grey background) and used sizeToFit: to shrink the UILabels to the content but the text is not perfectly left aligned. There is a gap on the left. The gap is bigger or smaller depending on the first character. I would like to align the red lines in the following picture. There is even a small gap with the small font in the grey UILabel but it's barely visible.
With the Z character the gap is smaller but still visible by the yellow area left to the Z
A simple UILabel alignment does not help for my specific problem, because the text content is dynamic and not static. So there could be any combination depending on the data I get from the backend. Therefore I was hoping for a UIFont or UILabel attribute that could return the size of the gap based on the current rendering of the text.
I know that there are great UIFont related attributes like baseline, capHeight and ascender one can access to align text but there seems to be no attribute that would return the value of this gap on the left.
If this doesn’t need to be two UILabels, you could have one with attributed text. Then both lines would be subject to the same layout.
I haven't tried the GUI which people have been posting Screen Shots of, however... the behaviour is consistent with the very nature of typography.
The font sizes are completely different, therefore the width of an em is different, subsequently the letter-spacing is also different.
See this: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/css2em.htm for more information.
I know this answer doesn't give you what you have asked for, however it should explain why this is happening.
For customisation such as this (if HTML and CSS) I would use a negative / positive margin on the sub text, however seeing as you are using backgrounds use padding (or the equivalent in your GUI).
Use attributed text of UILabel
set indentation as per your requirement
ref screen shot
Select both the labels and add a constraint called align leading edges.