Aligning half line to the left and the second to the right in CoreText

Question

I am creating a Point-of-Sale (POS) receipt and need to have item names with a certain width and need to have a price on the right (like float-right in CSS).

I am using https://github.com/FuerteInternational/FTCoreText to create the content. Any ideas how to achieve this without having to create two views and place them on top of each other?

Just to clarify, I need to have this:

Coffee                  £1.45
   milk, skinny
Danish Pastry           £1.75
Coca Cola               £1.10
Full English Bfst      £12.50

So pretty much I need a string to be floating on the left and other string floating on the right ...

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is inserting in each string f.e. 30 spaces after the first string and assigning wordWrap = truncate middle. Not so sure that this is exactly what you're looking for.

I agree with Brian Shamblen it'l be pretty easy to do with 2 labels.

Answer 2

It looks like what you want isn't really a second column, which Core Text cannot do out of the box, but rather a tabular layout (like good ol' <table>). Fortunately tabular layout can be acheived in Core Text by using tab stops. The only 2 things you need are:

• the CHARACTER TABULATION (U+0009) character,
• and a paragraph style with the correct tab stops setting.

That can be done this way:

NSString *string = @"Coffee\t£1.45\n  milk, skinny\nDanish Pastry\t£1.75\nCoca Cola\t£1.10\nFull English Bfst\t£12.50";
CGFloat width = 200;

NSArray *tabs = @[CFBridgingRelease(CTTextTabCreate(kCTTextAlignmentRight, width, NULL))];
CTParagraphStyleSetting setting = {kCTParagraphStyleSpecifierTabStops, sizeof(tabs), &tabs};
CTParagraphStyleRef paragraphStyle = CTParagraphStyleCreate(&setting, 1);
NSDictionary *attributes = @{CFBridgingRelease(kCTParagraphStyleAttributeName): CFBridgingRelease(paragraphStyle)};
NSAttributedString *attributedString = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:string attributes:attributes];

There are two caveats:

• You need to know the width of the view when creating the paragraph style.
• Core Text won't wrap lines on tab stops which means you have to make sure your text is short enough to fit.