A SwiftUI view that displays one or more lines of text with hyphenation
HyphenableText
HyphenableText is a Text view that displays one or multiple lines of text with support for hyphenation.
The Problem
In SwiftUI, when passing a longer text to a Text, it will automatically wrap its content to go on multiple lines, but when a word on its own is longer than the available space, it will just be broken without any indication. What Apple does in the system apps is to add hyphenation.
This can be done in UIKit very easily by using a AttributedString and its paragraphStyle with a hyphenationFactor set to 1.0. However, passing this AttributedString to a SwiftUI Text does nothing, as the component seems to be ignoring the paragraph style completely.
The Solution
HyphenableText resorts to Core Foundation to produce a string that contains soft hyphens.
A soft hypen (Unicode character \u{00AD}) lets the text presenter know that, in that location, there is an opportunity to break a word: when this happens, the presenter will also automatically display a hyphen.
In order to identify in which locations of the passed string there can be a hyphen, Core Foundation provides CFStringGetHyphenationLocationBeforeIndex, which returns the next possible location for a hyphen, assuming that hyphenation is available for the current language (see CFStringIsHyphenationAvailableForLocale).
You can invoke this algorithm directly by using the softHyphenated(withLocale:hyphenCharacter:) extension, which also provides valid default values for all parameters and can be invoked on any String.
Installation
HyphenableText is available through Swift Package Manager.
.package(url: "https://github.com/MrAsterisco/HyphenableText", from: "<see GitHub releases>")
Latest Release
To find out the latest version, look at the Releases tab of this repository.
Usage
HyphenableText can be used as any other SwiftUI view:
HyphenableText(
"Antidisestablishmentarianism juxtaposed with ultramicroscopic-silicovolcanoconiosis presents an inextricable conundrum of lexical intricacy."
)
HyphenableText supports the same appearance modifiers that Text supports.
Compatibility
HyphenableText requires iOS 13.0 or later, macOS 10.15 or later, watchOS 6.0 or later, tvOS 13 or later, or Mac Catalyst 13 or later.
Contributions
All contributions to expand the library are welcome. Fork the repo, make the changes you want, and open a Pull Request.
If you make changes to the codebase, I am not enforcing a coding style, but I may ask you to make changes based on how the rest of the library is made.
Status
This library is under active development. Even if most of the APIs are pretty straightforward, they may change in the future; but you don’t have to worry about that, because releases will follow Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.
License
HyphenableText is distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.