Introduction to Text System User Interface Layer

Text System User Interface Layer describes the high-level user interface to the Cocoa text system through the NSTextView class.

Who Should Read This Document

You should read this document if your application needs to present a user interface to the full capabilities of the text system, that is, if your users need to edit substantial amounts of text.

To understand this material you should have a general understanding of Cocoa programming conventions, and you should have read Cocoa Text Architecture Guide.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• The User-Interface Layer: NSTextView Class describes the capabilities and features of the NSTextView class, through which most applications interact with the text system.

• Creating an NSTextView Object explains how to instantiate an NSTextView object using Interface Builder.

• Creating an NSTextView Programmatically explains how to create an NSTextView object in code and cause it to create its supporting web of text-handling objects.

• Putting an NSTextView Object in an NSScrollView shows how to programmatically configure an NSTextView object with scroll bars.

• Using Multiple NSTextViews describes the attributes held in common by multiple text views configured to share a single layout manager.

• Plain and Rich Text Objects explains the difference between plain text and rich text and lists the RTF control words that any text object recognizes.

• Setting Text Attributes discusses text attributes and the action methods you can use to control them programmatically.

• Setting Text Margins describes the values, maintained by various text system objects, that affect the apparent margins surrounding text on a printed page or display.