Recipe: Drawing Text onto Paths

Sadly, Apple has not provided any API support whatsoever to allow you to draw text onto arbitrary paths such as UIBezierPath instances. That’s a shame, because it’s one of the most requested features for Core Text. Fortunately, Recipe 10-19 introduces a way to accomplish this. The method is passed an array of points representing the elements of a path. Recipe 10-19 draws text onto that path, making sure to preserve typographic integrity.

Figure 10-14 presents a gallery of drawing solutions that can be created with Recipe 10-19. Figure 10-14 (top left) shows drawing to a circle. Notice how the letters are laid out properly. Because wider characters take up more space, a sequence such as “wiw” would appear with typographic proportions, avoiding extra spaces on each side of the relatively thin “i” character.