Description

Marker is a light wrapper for creating and setting NSAttributedString values.

Requirements

• iOS 8.0+

Installation

Cocoapods (Deprecated 1.2.2)

Marker is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:

pod "Marker"

Swift Package Manager

Releases >1.2.2 are available through SPM.

Usage

TextStyle

Marker abstracts the most common attributed text properties into a data object called TextStyle, which it can use to create NSAttributedStrings. A TextStyle can have:

• Text color
• Regular font
• Italic font
• Bold font
• Character spacing
• Line spacing
• Line height
• Paragraph and line indentations
• Paragraph spacing
• Text alignment
• Line break mode
• Strikethrough style and color
• Underline style and color
• Text transformation option

TextStyle objects are a simple way of aggregating style information. For example:

var headlineTextStyle: TextStyle {

    let font: UIFont = UIFont.systemFontOfSize(23)
    let emFont: UIFont = UIFont.italicSystemFontOfSize(23)
    let strongFont: UIFont = UIFont.boldSystemFontOfSize(23)
    let characterSpacing: CGFloat? = 2
    let strikethroughStyle: NSUnderlineStyle = .styleSingle

    return TextStyle(font: regularFont,
                     emFont: emFont,
                     strongFont: strongFont,
                     characterSpacing: characterSpacing,
                     strikethroughStyle: strikethroughStyle)

}

Setting Attributed Text

Marker has convenience extensions for setting attributedText on common UI elements:

• UIButton
• UILabel
• UITextField
• UITextView

To set text on these elements, use setText(_:using:customMarkup:) (or setTitleText(_:using:customMarkup:) in the case of UIButton) function.

label.setText("Hello World", using: headlineTextStyle)

Optionally, you can pass custom markup information to selectively style segments of the specified text with custom TextStyle.

var blueTextStyle = headlineTextStyle
blueTextStyle.textColor = UIColor.blue

label.setText("The sky is #blue#.",
              using: headlineTextStyle,
              customMarkup: ["#": blueTextStyle])

Markdown

Marker also supports setting text with common Markdown tags:

• Bold (__ or **)
• Italic (_ or *)
• Links ([]())

As well as convenient Markdown tags specific to Marker:

• Strikethrough (~~)
• Underline (==)

To set Markdown text on these elements, use setMarkdownText(_:using:) (or setMarkdownTitleText(_:using:) for buttons) function. NOTE: Setting Markdown links work only in text views whereas other Markdown tags can be applied to any UI element with aforementioned setMarkdownText(_using:) function.

textField.setMarkdownText("_Hello World_", using: headlineTextStyle)

Backslash Escaping

Both Markdown and custom markup functions support backslash escaping for generating literal characters which are otherwise reserved for mark up purposes. For instance, URLs with ")" character in them would not be parsed correctly without backslash escapes.

[Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_(disambiguation))

By default, the parser produces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_(disambiguation as the URL for the above link.

[Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_(disambiguation\))

By backslash escaping the ")" character, the parser will treat it as a literal and produce the correct URL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_(disambiguation)).

Best Practices

Parsing operation for custom markup and Markdown strings can be too slow to use for performance-critical views such as UITableViewCell. In these cases, it's recommended to cache and reuse NSAttributedString's returned from Marker functions instead of calling either setText(_:using:customMarkup:) or setMarkdownText(_:using:) directly.

Contributing to Marker

To report a bug or enhancement request, feel free to file an issue under the respective heading.

If you wish to contribute to the project, fork this repo and submit a pull request. Code contributions should follow the standards specified in the Prolific Swift Style Guide.

License

Copyright (c) 2019 Prolific Interactive

Marker is maintained and sponsored by Prolific Interactive. It may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.