Introduction to Text System Overview

Text System Overview provides a survey of the Cocoa text system. The articles introduce important features and describe aspects of the text system as a whole.

Who Should Read This Document

Every developer who uses the text system directly should read this document.

To understand the information in this document you should have a general knowledge of Cocoa programming paradigms and, to understand the code examples, familiarity with the Objective-C language.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• “Text System Architecture” presents a high-level discussion of the design goals and capabilities of the text system, and it explains the roles of some important text classes.

• “The Cocoa Text System, MLTE, and ATSUI” briefly explains the position of the Cocoa text system relative to other Mac OS X text-handling technologies.

• “Typographical Features of the Cocoa Text System” explains the concepts of typography—such as glyphs, fonts, typefaces, and layout—that correlate with features of the text system.

• “Text Fields, Text Views, and the Field Editor” introduces the main user interface objects of the text system.

• “The Text System and MVC” explains how objects of the text system relate to the model-view-controller paradigm of object-oriented programming.

• “Common Configurations” describes various ways in which you can configure text system objects to accomplish different text-handling goals.

• “Class Hierarchy of the Cocoa Text System” presents an inheritance diagram of the text system classes.

• “Building a Text Editor in 15 Minutes” is a tutorial showing how you can quickly and easily create a very capable text editing program using Cocoa.

• “Simple Text Tasks” presents programming techniques to accomplish several text-related goals using the text system.

• “Assembling the Text System by Hand” shows how to instantiate and explicitly hook together objects of the text system programmatically.

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