Open Radar

 
Summary:

When setting an attributedText on a UITextView the text is rendered with Kerning disabled.


Steps to Reproduce:

Create a simple attributed string, e.g. "AV" in Times New Roman with 50 px font size

Expected Results:

When setting this attributed string on a UITextView it should display the text with Kerning, as is the default when rendering this text via CoreText. For the example "AV" the right bottom of the A is overlapping the left top of the V.

Actual Results:

Letters do not overlap making the text harder to read. Especially if using UITextView to display a longer text for reading it is bad to have Kerning disabled.

Regression:

Support for NSAttributedText is new as of iOS 6.

Notes:

Internally UITextView converts the attributed string to HTML via NSHTMLWriter and then displays it in a UIWebDocumentView. The default mode for this is to have Kerning disabled.

It can be enabled by the CSS style, which is mentioned at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;


Having this not be the default also confuses developer, as you can see on this question on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13239267/kerning-in-ios-uitextview


I propose that when text is set via setAttributedText on UITextView to make this setting the default since as a developer we would expect the output to match CoreText as closely as possible.