Drawing rich text, particularly editable rich text, has long been a real problem for iOS developers. No longer! iOS 6 finally integrates the kind of rich text capabilities that Mac developers have used for years. Previously neglected NSAttributedString is now the heart of rich text throughout UIKit. In this session you’ll learn your way around fonts, decorations, paragraph styles, text direction, and more.

But powerful as UIKit is, sometimes it just isn’t enough to get the kind of text layout you want. That’s were Core Text comes in. We’ll move through the entire stack from framesetters to glyphs. What’s leading? What’s the difference between a character and a glyph? Why is Core Text laying my text out upside down? You’ll find the answers to these and discover the world of ligatures, advances, font metrics, and text matrices. By the time we’re done, you’ll be able to get just the layout you want and keep your text readable and beautiful.