NSUnderlineStyleAttributeName Underline spacing

Question

I want the underline to be below the text like any other normal underlining mechanism. However, with NSAttributed string it leaves holes with "g's" and "y's"

example:

How it should look:

How can I increase the spacing between the underline and label?

Answer 1

There is no way to control that behaviour with NSAttributedString or CoreText (apart from drawing the underline yourself). NSAttributedString has no option for that (and CoreText hasn't got one, either).

On Apple systems, the first version (with the gap) is the "expected" behaviour as it's the one Apple provides and is used throughout the system (and apps like Safari, TextEdit, etc.).

If you really, really want to have underlines without a gap, you need to draw the string without an underline and draw the line yourself (which I needed to do in one of my projects and I can tell you it's hard; see this file, search for "underline").

Answer 2

I added a line (UIView) with height 1 and width like label, aligned to the bottom of the UILabel.

    let label = UILabel()     label.text = "underlined text"      let spacing = 2 // will be added as negative bottom margin for more spacing between label and line      let line = UIView()     line.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false     line.backgroundColor = label.textColor     label.addSubview(line)     label.addConstraints(NSLayoutConstraint.constraints(withVisualFormat: "H:|[line]|", metrics: nil, views: ["line":line]))     label.addConstraints(NSLayoutConstraint.constraints(withVisualFormat: "V:[line(1)]-(\(-spacing))-|", metrics: nil, views: ["line":line]))