Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

UITextField

A text field portrays just a single line of text (any return characters in its text are treated as spaces); otherwise, it has many of the same properties as a label. So, if you provide it with a plain NSString, it has a text, font, textColor, and textAlignment. It has adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth and minimumFontSize properties, although these don’t work exactly like a label; a text field won’t allow its font size to shrink automatically as small as a label will.

To provide a text field with an attributed string, you set its attributedText. In that case I would suggest that you not set its adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth to YES, as this behaves rather badly; it doesn’t allow any intermediate sizes, but either shrinks the text absolutely or doesn’t; and, if it does shrink it, it will cause your text to appear all in a single font.

Text that is too long for the text field is displayed with an ellipsis at the end. You can change the position of the ellipsis by assigning the text field an attributed string with different truncation behavior, such as NSLineBreakByTruncatingHead. When overly long text is being edited, the text shifts horizontally to show the insertion point. On the whole, though, text that is too long for the text field is probably not a very good idea; the user usually has no arrow keys, as on the desktop, so navigating long text is daunting (the user must select text and stretch the selection into the offscreen part of the text).

Regardless of whether you originally ...