I'm drawing some text in Mac/iOS cross-platform code using CoreText. I may be using fonts that do not have a real "Italic" version installed in the OS for all users, but they need to be aware that the text is italic even then.
With AppKit's NSAttributedString -drawAtPoint:, I can use NSObliquenessAttributeName to make the text slanted (and thus look italic -- well, oblique). CoreText doesn't seem to have an equivalent for this attribute. At least I found none in CTStringAttributes.h (not that there's any documentation even years after CoreText was released).
Does anyone know how I can get oblique text with CoreText on iOS?
Displaying a font that has no italic trait as italic is generally a bad idea. However, I can understand that there are some cases where this has to be enforced anyways.
The only solution that comes to my mind right now is to create a custom font with a sheared font matrix:
CGAffineTransform matrix = CGAffineTransformMake(1, tan(degreesToRadians(0)), tan(degreesToRadians(20)), 1, 0, 0);
CTFontRef myfont = CTFontCreateWithName(CFSTR("Helvetica"), 48, &matrix);
You'll have to play with the matrix and see what brings the best results. (Please not that this is a fake code mix out of my head and the internet.)