CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphonecocoa-touchiosuikitcore-text
overboming
overboming

Reputation: 1542

Any good text extensive application on iOS that use Core Text?

It seems most reading application that will display quite a lot of text will still use WebView instead of Core Text (Instapaper, iBooks, other reading apps).

I want to know if there are any concerns for those applications not using Core Text but WebView which will generally have rather poor performance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1776

Answers (2)

Max Seelemann
Max Seelemann

Reputation: 9364

This is quite simply answered:

  • Web views are easy to program. CoreText is not easy to program, even average CoreText usage involves lots of code.
  • Web views are very fast. They have been optimized by lots of professionals. No easy to copy.
  • In order to make CoreText fast you have to do a LOT of work. Building a performant CoreText view would require you to buffer, transform coordinates, etc. Nothing that needs to be done with web views.
  • As core text ist rendering only, you'll have to implement stuff like scrolling (at least partially) on your own. Performance is the key here. Buffering and extreme optimization will be required unfortunately...

That's why noone does it. CoreText can be faster. But currently (iOS 4.x) this is a LOT of work. Nothing to be done in just a few hours. Especially if you're not a pro, leave your hands of CoreText for large texts for now. My opinion...

EDIT: Things get hairy if you want to embed images, etc. You need to pass all these things down to core text. Requires lots of fine tuning...

Upvotes: 4

Krzysztof Zabłocki
Krzysztof Zabłocki

Reputation: 1307

Actually I've used CoreText to create a framework for making press related application, (books & magazines ) and it's being used for some products atm, It's not that hard to use CoreText but there are some problems and the documentation is not perfect either but it shouldn't be hard to learn how to use CoreText, you can find some sources on the web that are adjusted to fit iphone rather than MacOsX.

Cheers, Krzysztof Zabłocki

Upvotes: 1

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