Question

Aside from Webviews, are there any text layout frameworks on iOS for custom views?
OpenGL could work fine aswell as something UIView-based.

Think Metro UI-ish, and I’d really enjoy templates and some sort of adaptive capabilities for landscape, portrait, ipad vs iphone, etc.

Answer 1

CoreText.framework would be a good starting point. It’s a ‘Core’ framework, which integrates well with CoreGraphics. If you want UIView-centric rendering, prepare to write some wrappers.

A high level alternative to CoreText.framework would be to use NSAttributedString in UITextViews (ios6 or greater).

Here’s the high level overview:

Core Text provides a modern, low-level programming
interface for laying out text and handling fonts. The Core Text layout
engine is designed for high performance, ease of use, and close
integration with Core Foundation. The text layout API provides
high-quality typesetting, including character-to-glyph conversion,
with ligatures, kerning, and so on. The complementary Core Text font
technology provides automatic font substitution (cascading), font
descriptors and collections, easy access to font metrics and glyph
data, and many other features.

Multicore Considerations: All individual functions in Core Text are
thread safe. Font objects (CTFont, CTFontDescriptor, and associated
objects) can be used by simultaneously by multiple operations, work
queues, or threads. However, the layout objects (CTTypesetter,
CTFramesetter, CTRun, CTLine, CTFrame, and associated objects) should
be used in a single operation, work queue, or thread.