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iOS Build an Interactive Story App with Swift 2 Creating the User Interface Programmatically Attributed Strings

Kevin Gutowski
Kevin Gutowski
4,082 Points
Posted by Kevin Gutowski
Kevin Gutowski
4,082 Points

Seems like setting paragraph styles is quite a burden compared to design tools like Sketch.

While I understand that we are applying stylistic properties to a basic component (a string), I would have thought that Xcode would have provided some default functions to be able to manipulate paragraph styles much easier. For example, you commonly want to set a line height that is dependent on the font size (rather than specifying the exact size). I suppose that when displaying text people would want to customize how it is displayed so often that Xcode would be able to help us out a bit more.

1 Answer

Jari Koopman
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Jari Koopman
Python Web Development Techdegree Graduate 29,349 Points
Jari Koopman
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Jari Koopman
Python Web Development Techdegree Graduate 29,349 Points

Hi Kevin,

I might be wrong but I think that all this is achievable if you use storyboards (I'm not sure though). But I also think that this can be done in code, just try googling it or have a look on stack overflow.

Hope this helped,

Regards, Jari

Kevin Gutowski
Kevin Gutowski
4,082 Points
Kevin Gutowski
Kevin Gutowski
4,082 Points

Sure, but even the best suggestions I find online is using attributedString attributes which just seems insane to me. Like why would the default function require you to specify a range in the first place? Just seems like the way attributedStrings are setup is awful and I would probably just write some sort of extension or wrapper for doing basic functionality such as setting a paragraphs font size...

Ben Shockley
Ben Shockley
6,094 Points
Ben Shockley
Ben Shockley
6,094 Points

I would imagine if you're doing a whole lot of attributed string adjustments by code, you could pretty easily build a framework, or extension as you said, that would streamline the process. As a company, I am sure Apple wants to make things as easy as possible for the most amount of people, but there's also a line to walk between making it easy, and keeping it flexible and powerful at the same time.

That being said, these are Obj-C functions and systems that you're working with, so they're probably pretty old and established in the way that they work. I also wouldn't be surprised if they had plans to streamline this process in swift as it becomes more developed over time.

Just my thoughts on it.

-- Ben