DTRichTextEditor Programming Guide

This document tries to answer the kinds of questions a programmer might ask working with DTRichTextEditor and provide examples for common use cases.

Overriding Fonts

DTCoreTextFontDescriptor tries to find a font that matches its property. However if no font can found then it falls back to the fallback font family. The default value for this is “Times New Roman”. To specify a different fallback font family you can use the class method:

[DTCoreTextFontDescriptor setFallbackFontFamily:@"Helvetica"];

The family you set must be a valid one that is guaranteed to be available at run time.

DTCoreText uses an internal font override table to quickly find the correct font face name for a given combination of font family and bold and italic traits. This lookup process is an order of magnitude faster than searching through font tables. DTCoreText tries to load an override table plist from your app bundle at startup, named DTCoreTextFontOverrides.plist. It is recommended that you either use the one provided by the DTCoreText demo app or provide your own containing the fonts that you will be using.

You can also manually specify overrides:

[DTCoreTextFontDescriptor setOverrideFontName:@"Helvetica" forFontFamily:@"Calibri" bold:NO italic:NO];
[DTCoreTextFontDescriptor setOverrideFontName:@"Helvetica-Bold" forFontFamily:@"Calibri" bold:YES italic:NO];
[DTCoreTextFontDescriptor setOverrideFontName:@"Helvetica-Oblique" forFontFamily:@"Calibri" bold:NO italic:YES];
[DTCoreTextFontDescriptor setOverrideFontName:@"Helvetica-BoldOblique" forFontFamily:@"Calibri" bold:YES italic:YES];

Note that you are specifying font face names, not family names in this case.

Getting Typing Attributes

The typing attributes of a text range are the attributes that text gets that is newly inserted to replace the current selection. Since a selection can also be zero length (aka caret) there must also be a place for the editor to store those attributes until the user begins to time test.

The common pattern is to first check the overrideInsertionAttributes property and if this is not set, then query the editor for the typing attributes for the selection range:

UITextRange *range = editor.selectedTextRange;

NSDictionary *typingAttributes = editor.overrideInsertionAttributes;

if (!typingAttributes)
{
   typingAttributes = [editor typingAttributesForRange:range];
}

Setting Paragraph Spacing

Due to the various kinds of paragraph styles there can be in rich text it is not possible to set a single paragraph spacing. Instead you specify the paragraph spacing for each paragraph style with a modifier stylesheet which you set as part of the textDefaults. Those defaults are used when parsing HTML.

NSMutableDictionary *defaults = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
DTCSSStylesheet *styleSheet = [[DTCSSStylesheet alloc] initWithStyleBlock:@"p {margin-bottom:2.5em} ol {margin-bottom:2.5em} li {margin-bottom:2.5em}"];
[defaults setObject:styleSheet forKey:DTDefaultStyleSheet];
[editor setTextDefaults:defaults];

Typically you would set the bottom margin for the paragraph styles: P, OL, UL, H1-H6. These styles are combined with the default.css stylesheet found in DTCoreText.

Right to Left Text

Glyphs in glyph runs can be ordered left-to-right or right-to-left. You can determine which via the writingDirectionIsRightToLeft property of DTCoreTextGlyphRun.

UITextRange *range = editor.selectedTextRange;
DTCoreTextGlyphRun *run = [editor glyphRunAtPosition:[range start]];

BOOL rtl = run.writingDirectionIsRightToLeft;

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