iOS - Override UITextView Methods?

Question

I want to override the method that draws the text into a UITextView. What is the correct method to override?

It'd help a lot if you stated the actual problem and what you aim to achieve. This reads like your proposed solution :) — InsertWittyName, Jul 01 '11 at 18:06
I am trying to override this method to change the style of the text I am trying to draw. So let's say draw text with multiple colors — aryaxt, Jul 01 '11 at 18:09
You can draw text with different colors by setting the `textColor` property? — Pripyat, Jul 01 '11 at 18:10
@David no you can't that allows only 1 style for the whole text — aryaxt, Jul 01 '11 at 18:12

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

Update 2016-02-09: This answer is now wrong (and has been since iOS 6). You can now use UITextView by setting an NSAttributedString to the attributedText property instead of setting a normal NSString to the text property.

Relevant newer question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14231900/458205

Original Answer

There's no way to set different colours for different words in a UITextView.

There are multiple replacements for a UITextView which support rich text editing (listed bellow). However if you only want to give different text different color's in a UITextView (like syntax highlighting) the easiest thing to do is just use a UITextView itself for the editing with a CoreText overlay displaying the coloured text.

https://github.com/SquaredTiki/EditableCoreTextOverlay

EGOTextView : http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/egotextview
BCTextView : http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/bctextview
JTextView : http://codaset.com/jer/jtextview
http://www.cocoacontrols.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=rich+text&commit=Search

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '11 at 18:28

1

Multiple colors in a UITextView is not possible at this point in time. You can set one text color only.

If you need multiple text colors, the only way is loading a RTF file in a UIWebView, but that doesn't allow editing.

Maybe in iOS 5 there'll be RTF support for UITextView.

answered Jul 01 '11 at 18:28

Pripyat

2,937
2
35
69

that's not correct I've seen libraries that do this, but I want to write my own – aryaxt Jul 01 '11 at 20:41
I think you're getting mixed up between the meanings of `library` and `subclass`...? There're some subclasses that can do this to a limited extent on GitHub, but `UITextView` cannot. – Pripyat Jul 03 '11 at 09:39

iOS - Override UITextView Methods?

2 Answers2