Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / October 2005

i found it to be more "challenging" than i'd hoped, as well.

NSTextView is bad about font changes not "sticking," where sometimes it will
just randomly revert to its default font.  i have a vague memory of having
stumbled across a web page where somebody said this was a known issue, but i
can't recall the details.  so what i did was derive my own class from
NSTextView, and override the [NSTextView font] and [NSTextView setFont:]
methods with my own.  they get and set my custom NSFont pointer, which i made
a member of my class.  in the getter, if the font pointer is nil, i.e., this
is the first call, i load it up with a default font.

so, the first step to setting a default font is to make up your own custom
font pointer in your subclass, then call [NSTextView setFont:] with your
preferred font.  you might want to load this from prefs, so the user doesn't
have to keep setting it over and over.  NSTextView has hooks so that it can
automatically interact with the font picker window, so all you have to do is
give the user a menu option that brings up the font picker, and you've got
custom font selection out of the way.

when appending text to such a view, you have to do a little trickery, to make
sure the font will still be correct.  i added this method to my custom
NSTextView subclass:

 -(void)textAppend:(NSString*)text
   {
     NSFont*           font = [self font];
     NSTextStorage*    nsts = [self textStorage];
     NSMutableString*  nstr = [nsts mutableString];

     [nstr appendString:text];
     if (font) [nsts setFont:font];
   }

if you do all the stuff i've mentioned here, your requirements will be met.

can't help you with that one, sorry.  if i wanted to do that, i'd examine
NSLayoutManager.  i note that is has a defaultLineHeightForFont: method that
you might be able to override.  or perhaps there is some attribute you can
apply to the NSTextStorage object inside the NSTextView.

It certainly would do nothing, because there are no characters in the
NSTextStorage that this attribute could apply to. NSAttributedString does
not hold zero-range attributes.

You're conflating two separate concepts here, one of which is the idea of
setting attributes for existing text, and the other of which is setting
attributes for new text. This is perfectly understandable, of course,
because the GUI makes it look like they're the same, but under the hood
they're completely unrelated.

You already know how to set attributes for existing text. To set the
attributes for newly-typed text, use NSTextView's setTypingAttributes:
method. Note that it resets every time the selection is changed, so if you
want to hold it constant you'll have to manually re-reset it in that case.