Question

I want to implement custom text fields. Here is a screenshot of what I want to implement:

So I have a UITableView with cells, and in each cell I have several text fields: one for date, one for name, one for theme, and one for text. But the UI requires theme and text to be next to each other (as can you see in the picture). I wanted to implement this as a single UITextField, but as far as I know, UITextField supports only one type of font. So maybe someone will give me a piece of advice how to implement the design shown in the screenshot — do I have to draw custom text fields, or are there simpler solutions? Any code samples or propositions would be helpful.

Answer 1

For iOS 6:

You can set a UITextField‘s attributed string:

@property(nonatomic,copy) NSAttributedString *attributedText;

I suggest to use a NSMutableAttributedString and to exploit polymorphism.

A mutable attributed string can hold vary attributes for each piece of the string. So you can add an attribute only for a certain range of the string with this method:

- (void)setAttributes:(NSDictionary *)attributes range:(NSRange)aRange;

For iOS 5:

Use directly this UITextField‘s property:

- (void)setAttributes:(NSDictionary *)attributes range:(NSRange)aRange;