Using DTCoreText with RubyMotion - ios

Question

I'm currently working on my first major RubyMotion application. I have a lot of html text to display, and want to move away from using UIWebView -- as it's a bit of a hack and it's hard to size correctly without a lot of hoops. So, one of my options is DTCoreText, which seems like the most used and stable control of this lot.
I originally tried to use the CocoaPod version, but for some reason it's causing issues with MKNetworkKit from another pod. I messed with it for a bit, but saw that there are a lot of reported issues in MKNetworkKit about the build process, so I best left it alone.
Instead, I went for the vendor option. I git cloned the DTCoreText repo into my vendor directory and added it to my project. While it gets me closer by compiling the library and making my libDTCoreText.a file, I'm still stuck after actually running it.
My Rake files includes this (the rest is pretty generic):
app.vendor_project('vendor/DTCoreText',
:xcode,
:target => 'Static Library',
:products => ['libDTCoreText.a'])
app.libs << '/usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib' #For DTCoreText
Like I said, the libDTCoreText.a file gets compiled and copied into the right place in my project.
My app has this in the code. It's as basic as possible -- I just wanted to see it work.
#source = DTAttributedTextView.alloc.initWithFrame(CGRectZero)
#source.attributedString = NSAttributedString.alloc.initWithHTMLData(post.source.dataUsingEncoding(NSString.defaultCStringEncoding), options:{}, documentAttributes:nil)
#source.frame = [[self.frame.size.width / 2 - size.width / 2, 600], [250, 250]]
The application compiles, fine but at runtime when we hit the code above, it crashes with:
Objective-C stub for message `initWithHTMLData:options:documentAttributes:'
type `##:##^#' not precompiled. Make sure you properly link with the framework
or library that defines this message.
*** simulator session ended with error: Error Domain=DTiPhoneSimulatorErrorDomain
Code=1 "The simulated application quit." UserInfo=0x10019d470
{NSLocalizedDescription=The simulated application quit., DTiPhoneSimulatorUnderlyingErrorCodeKey=-1}
Does anyone have any ideas where I can start looking? I don't know a ton about the XCode build process yet, so it's possible I'm missing something. But it just seems like it should work. It's saying to me that it can see the headers correctly (and can compile), but it doesn't know where the actual library is.

Answer 1

Well, I have relevant experience with DTCoreText but none with RubyMotion. DTCoreText uses categories, and as such has special load requirements. In my Xcode project, in "Other Linker Flags", I have this: -force_load $(BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR)/libDTCoreText.a
That line insures that the library is properly loaded. If you don't do that, you get crashes when you try to use it.
I've been very happy using DTCoreText now for a year, and IMHO its a much better solution for attributed text than using UIWebViews.