Text display
Display localized text from your app’s interface, and discover how to lay out and render text yourself.
Manage text as string data
Words are a powerful communication tool and have multiple roles within apps. Whether you display words in your interface, or capture someone else’s words as data or input, the presentation of text involves the collaboration of several different types:
Strings are data objects that store the characters you want to display. Some string types also store data about how to format individual characters.
Fonts provide the visual appearance of text. The font family defines the shape of characters, while size and style values change the dimensions or appearance of those shapes.
Views display strings using the font information you provide. Views use layout objects to help calculate the position of individual characters based on their font and the available space.
Manage text as string data
Store text in your app using the provided String type, which is Unicode-correct, efficient, and suitable for managing text of any length or in any language. The type is also interchangeable with the `NSString` type common in Objective-C interfaces, so you can use it in both Swift and Objective-C code.
When you need to manage text and style information together, store that text in an AttributedString type instead of a regular string. Attributed strings are also strings, but they allow you to apply font, style, and other visual and nonvisual characteristics to the characters of that string. For example, you can store a URL with a range of characters and use it to create a link during rendering. You can apply attributes to the entire string, to a subset of characters, or to a single character.
Choose the fonts for your text
The Typography on Apple platforms is always present, adapts readily to support Typography and Accessibility features, and supports an extensive range of weights, styles, and languages. The system font is the best choice for labels and text you display from the views of your app’s interface. Configure the font with custom parameters or retrieve one of the standard fonts that defines the weight and style information for you. The standard fonts allow you to choose a font based on the meaning of your content. For example, apply the title font to section headers to make them stand out visually from paragraphs of body text. Access the system fonts using the APIs for Font, UIFont.TextStyle, and NSFont.TextStyle.
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For text that requires a more personalized appearance, choose from the system’s other built-in fonts or use your own Bundle a custom font with your app. Apple platforms ship with a large collection of fonts you can apply to document-based text or other personal content. Create these fonts directly in your code or display the UIFontPickerViewController or NSFontPanel font picker interface. For example, a word processor or text-creation app might apply these fonts to the selected text or any new text someone creates. Bundle a custom font with your app and access them from your code, or Install fonts for systemwide use with the rest of the system.
Display text in your interface
Display text in your interface using the standard text views that Text input and output, Text display and fonts, and Text Display provide. Standard text views render your text in a consistent and efficient way. They also adapt automatically to Dark Mode, Typography, Accessibility, and other system settings so you don’t have to handle those changes yourself.
When you add text to one of the standard text views, the view displays that text using the Typography by default. For labels and text fields, you typically use the same font for the entire string. For text views, you you can specify multiple fonts using an attributed string or continue to use a single font for all of the text.
Each app-builder framework defines the approach for applying fonts to your text:
In SwiftUI, Applying custom fonts to text to standard text views using a Text input and output. Choose a predefined Font type for the text style you want, or create a custom instance with your preferred font information.
In UIKit, apply fonts to the standard text views using the methods and properties of those views. Retrieve predefined instances of the UIFont or UIFont.TextStyle from the UIFont type, or create custom fonts using the initializers of that type. You can also collect the font attributes you want in a UIFontDescriptor, and use that type to create a font object.
In AppKit, apply fonts to the standard text views using the methods and properties of those views. Retrieve predefined instances of the NSFont from the NSFont type. You can also retrieve fonts meant for specific types of NSFont, or create custom font objects from NSFont.
When you need more control over the placement of text in your view, Build a custom text view using TextKit for TextKit or TextKit. TextKit provides the types you need to lay out and render text efficiently, and in a way that’s compatible with the App design and UI.
Prepare your text for translation
If you’re planning to support multiple languages, Supporting multiple languages in your app your code to make it ready to handle different languages. During this process, identify the Preparing your app’s text for translation and other content that require translation and look for places where you use Preparing dates, currencies, and numbers for translation, images, and other content that might change after translation. Update your code to create this information in a localization-friendly way.
Localizing and varying text with a string catalog offer a modern way to manage localizable string resources in your app. A string catalog keeps all of your translations in one place, and gives you ways to customize translations based on grammatical differences. For example, a string that contains a number can have different translations when the number indicates zero, one, or more than one item. You can also specify per-device translations to adjust text for different device sizes.
Xcode automatically collects properly marked strings in your code and places them in string catalogs. In SwiftUI, the view initializers always mark text as localizable and add them to your string catalogs. To add other strings, use a String initializer that takes a localized value, as shown in the following example:
myLabel.string = String(localized: "There are \(peopleInChat) people in this chat.",
comment: "Label indicating number of chat participants.")All string types store text as Unicode characters and support both left-to-right and right-to-left languages. If you support bidirectional text, make sure the rest of your text Get it right (to left) correctly. For example, use RangeSet to correctly manage text selections with bidirectional text.
Build a custom text view
If you need more control over the placement and display of text than the standard text views offer, create a custom view with Meet TextKit 2 for TextKit or TextKit. Use this approach if you’re building a word processor or similarly advanced app that requires sophisticated text handling. TextKit gives you the types you need to manage and lay out text precisely in your custom view. It also integrates with other system features, like Dive deeper into Writing Tools, so you can incorporate those features into your own text-based code.