I would like to highlight a part of text in a UITextView like Pages for iOS or Safari for iOS do. I search the documentation but I can't find a way to do it, maybe because I'm a beginner in iOS development and I miss some crucial info. Somebody can help me?
Screenshot of Pages for iOS:
Screenshot of Safari for iOS:
If you only need to highlight a single, contiguous block of text you can set the selection programmatically. Your examples show multiple discontinuous parts however. For that you are going to need to use an attributed string. There is no other system-provided highlighting function. (There might be a third party library that offers this though - you'll have to search.)
Related
I'm making an iPad app that lets me write swift code into a text box and save it to a document. It doesn't do any compilation or any complicated stuff like that, so I'm just looking for a way to format the code correctly in the text box (ex: code autocomplete, autoindent if possible, and maybe syntax highlighting). In short, I'd like my app's text field and keyboard to look similar to those of Swift Playgrounds.
If Apple's provided the code (or a built-in keyboard option that can do even some of this), I'd appreciate a link to it. Otherwise, how would I go about building a custom keyboard and text field (or at least disable the features like autocomplete that would get in the way)?
Thanks.
As far as I know the only way to do what you describe is to build a Swift Playgrounds app that presents a code editor window. Apple does provide documentation on creating third party iPad Swift playgrounds. I suggest looking it up on Apple's site.
I'm a beginner to iOS development and I'm learning how to build something along the lines of a note taking app using Swift, and I want to allow the user to bold, underline, and italicize text. Kind of like how it's done in Apple's Notes app. I'm using a UITextView right now, but that only allows for basic text input.
I want to know how these options are displayed to the user and also how to store this text information. Simply storing the user input as a string doesn't work because it has no way to retain the bold, underlined, and italicized portions (or maybe I'm missing something). Does apple have API for something like this? I have looked into NSAttributedString, but I'm not really sure if that works for this case.
Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!
I am looking to create an emoji keyboard, which works similar to the native one on iPhone.
Currently all apps that provide a keyboard, do not let you insert an emoji inline with the text.. rather they provide you the ability to 'paste' it in like an image.
In addition to this, if an emoji is sent to a user that doesnt have the app installed, will they see the 'emoji' or will it display as a bunch of random characters?
I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction, as I cannot find the detail I am looking for.
Thanks
As for creating custom keyboards, you should get started by reading Apple's official documentation on the subject.
To answer your question about displaying Emoji: Any platform that supports Emoji will see them as an Emoji. A good source to see which platforms support it is CanIEmoji.com. Any other platforms will likely display it as an empty square, since it is not a supported character.
Any custom emoji keyboard you create will show up like a picture attachment, iOS especially doesn't allow custom inline emojis. Check out these two articles they might help with even more info:
https://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/blog/emoji-apps/
https://medium.com/#mantia/so-you-want-to-build-an-emoji-keyboard-26450ba5136a
We want a native rich text editor because we are trying to stay away from using Javascript and webviews for this solution.
We've tried many things so far, and we're left with quite a few obstacles that we just can't get around. Let me break it down into questions that I hope you can answer.
I have a UIButton, that says "B" on it, and I want to put it into the 'selected' state when a user sets 'Bold' from using the TextView's long-press gesture on a selection. How do I register for this state change? I tried adding an observer on the textView.attributedText, but it doesn't seem they are changing that dictionary, but instead are updating it. NSDictionary has no way, as far as I know, to add observers on the dictionary's keys. So I'm stuck with noticing this change.
Regarding number 1, I also tried setting the textView's inputDelegate and it seems that the method - (void)textDidChange:(id )textInput never gets called. :( Docs says is should. What did I do wrong?
How do I update the attributedText weight when I hit my bold italic or underline button.
How do I convert my attributed text into HTML?
I saw a few neat libraries for number 4, but I'm still curious what you'd come up with. (Broadens my options). But, I can't really work on number 4 until I figure out how to do the previous 3.
This editor will also need hyperlinks, bulleted lists, and numbered lists, more things I imagine I'll struggle through, but if you could answer the 4 questions above, that will keep me held over for a while. :)
Thanks!
Here is a link to an iOS rich text editor I've been working on.
https://github.com/aryaxt/iOS-Rich-Text-Editor
There is still a lot of work that has to be done, but the basic features are there.
The Apple sample application called 'TextEdit' does much of what you've described and, if not that, would be a very good starting point. Find the sample code with a search in the Organizer.
There is a commercial editor based on the DTCoreText library. I've used that library but not the rich text editor. Look at the Cocoanetics web site. It's not cheap but will save you a ton of work.
I'm working on an iOS app in which I need to implement a basic text view with these requirements:
Rich text
Font emphasis (bold, italics).
Inline images for hyperlink-like actions.
Scrolling
Getting and setting the scroll offset (for remembering the previous scroll position).
Text selection
Getting the selected text character range.
Scrolling the view when selecting text, if needed.
I believe I could achieve this with UIWebView but the problem with this is that it provides very little control and is somewhat slow and shows a blank screen while loading. I was wondering if this could be achieved with Core Text but regarding the text selection I'm not sure. I'm hoping to achieve as iOS-native behaviour as possible.
What I'd need is pretty much like Instapaper's text view.
OmniGroup have done something like this by creating a text editor much like UITextView which draws the text using Core Text but also has all the editing features of UITextView as well as Rich text features from Core Text.
You can find it here.
There are some answers about this in StackOverflow, for example: Core text tutorial
However the best tutorial I ever read about Core Text in iOS is not listed in any answer I've found: How to create a simple magazine app with core text
Please notice that CoreText is only available for iOS 3.2 or superior.