CoreText: set text font and alignment to CFAttributedString

For a person like me, who is not familiar with working with CoreText most common tasks can be really painful. I hope this post saves you some time if you’re looking for information on how to set font and align your CFAttributedString. For text alignment you have to assign CTTextAlignment to CTParagraphStyle first and then set that CTParagraphStyle to your CFAttributedString. Setting font has more direct approach – CFAttributedString has special attribute for that.

In clearer terms aka code form:

//    create attributed string
 CFMutableAttributedStringRef attrStr = CFAttributedStringCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);
 CFAttributedStringReplaceString (attrStr, CFRangeMake(0, 0), (CFStringRef) textString);

 //    create font
 CTFontRef font = CTFontCreateWithName(CFSTR("Times New Roman"), 16, NULL);

 //    create paragraph style and assign text alignment to it
 CTTextAlignment alignment = kCTJustifiedTextAlignment;
 CTParagraphStyleSetting _settings[] = {    {kCTParagraphStyleSpecifierAlignment, sizeof(alignment), &alignment} };
 CTParagraphStyleRef paragraphStyle = CTParagraphStyleCreate(_settings, sizeof(_settings) / sizeof(_settings[0]));

 //    set paragraph style attribute
 CFAttributedStringSetAttribute(attrStr, CFRangeMake(0, CFAttributedStringGetLength(attrStr)), kCTParagraphStyleAttributeName, paragraphStyle);

 //    set font attribute
 CFAttributedStringSetAttribute(attrStr, CFRangeMake(0, CFAttributedStringGetLength(attrStr)), kCTFontAttributeName, font);

 //    release paragraph style and font
 CFRelease(paragraphStyle);
 CFRelease(font);

Tags: , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 09:19 and is filed under iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 responses

  1. Jonah Cua
    Posted January 29, 2011 at 20:06 | Permalink

    I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your site to come back in the future. All the best

    Reply
  2. soccer
    Posted April 12, 2011 at 05:12 | Permalink

    I am agree with you that view, I think it’s accurate, expressing feelings in my heart, said well, also my favorites were soccer shoes.

    Reply
  3. *
    Posted February 26, 2012 at 05:40 | Permalink

    Yes it’s true, That is beneficial

    Reply

Leave a Reply