Question

I need a UILabel subcass with multiline attributed text with support for links, bold styles, etc. I also need tail truncation with an ellipsis. None of the open source code that supports attributed text inside UILabels (TTTAttributedLabel, OHAttributedLabel, TTStyledTextLabel) seem to support tail truncation for multi-line text. Is there an easy way to get this?

Answer 1

Hi I am the developer of OHAttributedLabel.

There is no easy way to achieve this (as explained in the associated issue I opened on the github repository of my project), because CoreText does not offer such feature.

The only way to do this would be to implement the text layout yourself using CoreText objects (CTLine, etc) instead of using the CTFrameSetter that does this for you (but w/o managing line truncation). The idea would be to build all the CTLines to lay them out (depending on the glyphs in your NSAttributedString it contains and the word wrapping policy) one after the other and manage the ellipsis at the end yourself.

I would really appreciate if someone propose a solution to do this propery as it seems a bit of work to do and you have to manage a range of special/unusual cases too (emoji cases, fonts with odd metrics and unusual glyphs, vertical alignment, take into account the size of the ellipsis itself at the end to know when to stop).

So feel free to dig around and try to implement the framing of the lines yourself it would be really appreciated!