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Introduction to Text System Overview

Contents:

Who Should Read This Document
Organization of This Document
See Also

Text System Overview provides a survey of the Cocoa text system. The articles introduce important features and describe aspects of the text system as a whole.

Who Should Read This Document

Every developer who uses the text system directly should read this document.

To understand the information in this document you should have a general knowledge of Cocoa programming paradigms and, to understand the code examples, familiarity with the Objective-C language.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• “Text System Architecture” presents a high-level discussion of the design goals and capabilities of the text system, and it explains the roles of some important text classes.

• “The Cocoa Text System, MLTE, and ATSUI” briefly explains the position of the Cocoa text system relative to other Mac OS X text-handling technologies.

• “Typographical Features of the Cocoa Text System” explains the concepts of typography—such as glyphs, fonts, typefaces, and layout—that correlate with features of the text system.

• “Text Fields, Text Views, and the Field Editor” introduces the main user interface objects of the text system.

• “The Text System and MVC” explains how objects of the text system relate to the model-view-controller paradigm of object-oriented programming.

• “Common Configurations” describes various ways in which you can configure text system objects to accomplish different text-handling goals.

• “Class Hierarchy of the Cocoa Text System” presents an inheritance diagram of the text system classes.

• “Building a Text Editor in 15 Minutes” is a tutorial showing how you can quickly and easily create a very capable text editing program using Cocoa.

• “Simple Text Tasks” presents programming techniques to accomplish several text-related goals using the text system.

• “Assembling the Text System by Hand” shows how to instantiate and explicitly hook together objects of the text system programmatically.

See Also

The following documents discuss specific aspects of the text system architecture in greater detail:

• Text System User Interface Layer Programming Guide for Cocoa describes the high-level interface to the Cocoa text system.

• Text System Storage Layer Overview discusses the lower-level facilities that the Cocoa text system uses to store text.

For further reading, see other documents in the Cocoa Text and Fonts Documentation. In addition, please refer to the Cocoa text-related code samples on the Apple Developer Connection website and the Application Kit examples installed with the Xcode Tools.

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