How to fit text in a circle in UILabel

Question

I'd like to flow the text in UILabel into a circle (instead of rect). I did some experiments with NSLayoutManager, NSTextContainer and NSTextStorage but it does not seem to work. The example below is supposed to flow the text into a smaller rect of 40x40 (label is 120x120) but does not seem to have any effect.

UIFont *font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue" size:12];
NSTextStorage *ts = [[NSTextStorage alloc] initWithString:multiline.title attributes:@{NSFontAttributeName:font}];
NSLayoutManager *lm = [[NSLayoutManager alloc] init];
NSTextContainer *tc = [[NSTextContainer alloc] initWithSize:CGSizeMake(40, 40)];
[lm addTextContainer:tc];
[ts addLayoutManager:lm];
self.label.attributedText = ts;

Ides?

Answer 1

This appeared to be a very simple solution. NSTextContainer has an exclusionPaths property. What you can do is to create two Bezier paths that will define areas that should be excluded.

So I did that and here is my method:

- (void)setCircularExclusionPathWithCenter:(CGPoint)center radius:(CGFloat)radius textView:(UITextView *)textView
{
    UIBezierPath *topHalf = [UIBezierPath bezierPath];
    [topHalf moveToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x - radius, center.y + radius)];
    [topHalf addLineToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x - radius, center.y)];
    [topHalf addArcWithCenter:center radius:radius startAngle:M_PI endAngle:0.0f clockwise:NO];
    [topHalf addLineToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x + radius, center.y + radius)];
    [topHalf closePath];

    UIBezierPath *bottomHalf = [UIBezierPath bezierPath];
    [bottomHalf moveToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x - radius, center.y - radius)];
    [bottomHalf addLineToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x - radius, center.y)];
    [bottomHalf addArcWithCenter:center radius:radius startAngle:M_PI endAngle:0 clockwise:YES];
    [bottomHalf addLineToPoint:CGPointMake(center.x + radius, center.y - radius)];
    [bottomHalf closePath];

    textView.textContainer.exclusionPaths = @[bottomHalf, topHalf];
}

Example usage:

[self setCircularExclusionPathWithCenter:CGPointMake(160.0f, 200.0f)
                                  radius:100.0f
                                textView:_textView];

And a result of my experiments:

Of course you will have to use a UITextView instead of UILabel but I hope it helps :)