AttributedString Markdown initializer with custom styling
AttributedString
in iOS 15 and macOS 12 comes with a Markdown initializer.
But:
- There is no styling (not even bold or italic) when drawing the
AttributedString
in a custom view. - The
AttributedString
does have some styling applied when it’s assigned to aUILabel
or to aUITextView
, but they are noticeably different and weird things happen with the font sizes. - All line breaks that should separate the content blocks are missing.
- The
AttributedString
colors don’t react to toggling between dark and light mode.
What’s going on?
There is not a lot of information about Markdown in AttributedString
out there yet, but I think I was just holding it wrong:
The Markdown initializer merely adds semantic (not visual) markup to the AttributedString
. Both UILabel
and UITextView
interpret these to a certain extent, while drawing a raw (NS)AttributedString
doesn’t.
The Markdown initializer merely puts the Markdown parsing results as Presentation Intents into the AttributedString
runs.
- There are
inlinePresentationIntent
s, e.g..stronglyEmphasized
for bold text. - There are
presentationIntent
s for blocks like headlines (like.header(1)
for aH1
).
This sample project
This sample project shows how you can find these intents and replace them with actual AttributedString
styling information like font weights and foreground colors.
I don’t know if there’s a more elegant way to solve this. Do let me know if you have a better solution!
© 2021 Frank Rausch