15.2. Drawing Text
Problem
You want to be able to draw text on the screen of an iOS device.
Solution
Use the drawAtPoint:withFont:
method of NSString
.
Discussion
To draw text, we can use some really handy methods built into
the NSString
class, such as
drawAtPoint:withFont:
. Before we
proceed further, make sure that you have followed the instructions in
Recipe 15.0. You should now have a view
object, subclassed from UIView
,
named GraphicsViewControllerView
.
Open that file. If the drawRect:
instance method of the view object is commented out, remove the
comments until you have that method in your view object:
#import "GraphicsViewControllerView.h" @implementation GraphicsViewControllerView - (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame{ self = [super initWithFrame:frame]; if (self) { // Initialization code } return self; } - (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect{ } @end
The drawRect:
method is
where we’ll do the drawing, as mentioned before. Here, we can start
loading the font, and then draw a simple string on the screen at point
40 on the x axis and 180 on the
y axis (Figure 15-11):
- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect{ UIFont *helveticaBold = [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Bold" size:40.0f]; NSString *myString = @"Some String"; [myString drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(40, 180) withFont:helveticaBold]; }
In this code, we are simply loading a bold Helvetica font at
size 40, and using it to draw the text Some
String
at point (40, 180).
Figure 15-11. A random string drawn on the graphical context of a view
Get iOS 5 Programming Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.