Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Text

In This Chapter

• Displaying text

• Changing the style of text

• Editing text

• Saving text to a file

• Opening and displaying text files

Ever since the first Macintosh computer, Apple has led the consumer computer world in design, layout, and typography. Mac OS X continues this tradition by providing some of the best-looking text that you'll ever see on a computer monitor. Cocoa gives programmers instant access to these wonderful features of OS X.

This chapter shows you how to work with text for a variety of purposes. First, you display some text in a window. Then, you manipulate that text, contorting its sizes and altering its hue. Next, you discover how easy it is to add professional text-editing features to your applications with little or no code. Finally, you save the text from your interface to a file for later recall. Stylized text is a great feature for many types of applications, and Cocoa gives you a wide range of tools for manipulating that text.

Working with Text

Cocoa has many different controls for working with text in applications. Some text controls display text as a label; other controls permit full editing like a word processor. Interface Builder offers several controls for working with text, but they generally inherit from one of two controls:

• NSTextField: Displays static or dynamic text. Use this control to display one line of text.

• NSTextView: The star of the text fields in Cocoa. This baby can work with multiple lines of text. When you think of a word processor, ...