iOS Text View that Properly Displays LaTeX and YouTube/Vimeo Links

by iOS Example

RichTextView

iOS Text View (UIView) that Properly Displays LaTeX, HTML, Markdown, and YouTube/Vimeo Links.

Installation

Using Cocoapods

Simply add the following to your Podfile:

pod 'RichTextView'

And run pod install in your repo.

Using Carthage

Simply add the following to your Cartfile:

github "tophat/RichTextView"

And run carthage update --platform iOS in your repo.

Usage

You can instantiate a RichTextView by importing the project first:

import RichTextView

To init a RichTextView:

let richTextView = RichTextView(
    input: "Test",
    latexParser: LatexParser(),
    font: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: UIFont.systemFontSize),
    textColor: UIColor.black,
    frame: CGRect.zero,
    completion: nil
)

You can also update an existing RichTextView as follows:

richTextView.update(
    input: "Test",
    latexParser: LatexParser(),
    font: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: UIFont.systemFontSize),
    textColor: UIColor.black,
    completion: nil
)

All of the parameters above are Optional, for both the init and update methods (except for frame). The parameters are defined as follows:

  • input - The string you want to render
  • latexParser - You can pass your own class that conforms to LatexParserProtocol if you want to handle LaTeX parsing in a custom way. Currently we use the iosMath Pod to handle LaTeX parsing by default
  • font - The font of the text to render
  • texColor - The color of the text to render
  • completion - A completion block to handle any errors that might be returned. The input will still render even if there are errors, however it might look differently than expected.

Formatting the input

In order for the RichTextView to handle the various use cases it might encounter, the input string needs to be formatted as follows:

  • LaTeX: Put any text you want to render as LaTeX in between two [math] and [/math] tags. Example: [math]x^n[/math]
  • Code: Put any text you want to render as code in between two [code] and [/code] tags. Example: [code]print('Hello World')[/code]
  • HTML/Markdown: No formatting necessary
  • YouTube Videos: Put the ID of the YouTube video in a YouTube tag as follows: youtube[dQw4w9WgXcQ]. The YouTube ID of any video can be found by looking at the URL of the video (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) and taking the value right after the v= URL parameter. In this case the ID of the YouTube video is dQw4w9WgXcQ
  • Vimeo Videos: Put the ID of the Vimeo video in a Vimeo tag as follows: vimeo[100708006]. The Vimeo ID of any video can be found by looking at the URL of the video (Example: https://vimeo.com/100708006) and taking the value right after the first /. In this case the ID of the Vimeo video is 100708006

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