How to lose margin padding in UITextView

Question

I have a UITextView in my iOS Application  which displays a large amount of text   I am then paging this text by using the offset margin parameter of the UITextView   My problem is that the padding of the UITextView is confusing my calculations as it seems to be different depending on the font size and typeface that I use   Therefore  I pose the question  Is it possible to remove the padding surrounding the content of the UITextView   Look forward to hearing your responses

User · Answer

Latest Swift   self textView textContainerInset    init top  -2  left  0  bottom  0  right  0  self textView textContainer lineFragmentPadding   0

User · Answer

In case you want to set a HTML string and avoid the bottom padding  please make sure that you are not using block tags i e  div  p   In my case this was the reason  You can easily test it out by replacing occurrences of block tags with i e  span tag

User · Answer

Here s an easy little extension that will remove Apple s default margin from every text view in your app   Note  Interface Builder will still show the old margin  but your app will work as expected    extension UITextView       open override func awakeFromNib           super awakeFromNib          removeMargins                 Removes the Apple textview margins        public func removeMargins           self contentInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake           0  -textContainer lineFragmentPadding           0  -textContainer lineFragmentPadding

User · Answer

Doing the inset solution I still had padding on the right side and the bottom  Also text alignment was causing issues  The only sure fire way I found was to put the text view inside another view that is clipped to bounds

User · Answer

In case anyone looking for latest Swift version then below code is working fine with Xcode 10 2 and Swift 4 2  yourTextView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsets top  0  left  0  bottom  0  right  0

User · Answer

Up-to-date for 2021 It is one of the silliest bugs in iOS  The class given here  UITextViewFixed   is used widely  and is usually the most reasonable solution overall  Here is the class   IBDesignable class UITextViewFixed  UITextView       override func layoutSubviews             super layoutSubviews           setup             func setup             textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsets zero         textContainer lineFragmentPadding   0          Don t forget to turn off scrollEnabled in the Inspector   The solution works properly in storyboard  The solution works properly at runtime   That s it  you re done  In general  that should be all you need in most cases  Even if you are changing the height of the text view on the fly  UITextViewFixed usually does all you need   A common example of changing the height on the fly  is changing it as the user types   Here is the broken UITextView from Apple     Here is UITextViewFixed   Note that of course you must       turn off scrollEnabled in the Inspector   Turning on scrollEnabled means  quot make this view expand as much as possible vertically by expanding the bottom margin as much as possible  quot    Some further issues  1  In some very unusual cases dynamically changing heights  Apple does a bizarre thing  they add extra space at the bottom  No  really  This would have to be one of the most infuriating things in iOS  If you encounter the problem  here is a  quot quick fix quot  which usually helps              textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsets zero         textContainer lineFragmentPadding   0                    this is not ideal  but sometimes this  quot quick fix quot             will solve the  quot extra space at the bottom quot  insanity          var b   bounds         let h   sizeThatFits CGSize             width  bounds size width             height  CGFloat greatestFiniteMagnitude           height        b size height   h        bounds   b        2  In rare cases  to fix yet another subtle mess-up by Apple  you have to add  override func setContentOffset   contentOffset  CGPoint  animated  Bool        super setContentOffset contentOffset  animated  false     sic     3  Arguably  we should be adding   contentInset   UIEdgeInsets zero  just after  lineFragmentPadding   0 in UITextViewFixed   However     believe or not     that just doesn t work in current iOS   Checked 2021    It may be necessary to add that line in the future  The fact that UITextView is broken in iOS is one of the weirdest things in all of mobile computing   Ten year anniversary of this question and it s still not fixed  Finally  here s a somewhat similar tip for TextField  https   stackoverflow com a 43099816 294884 Completely random tip  how to add the  quot     quot  on the end Often you are using a UITextView  quot like a UILabel quot    So you want it to truncate text using an ellipsis  quot     quot  If so  add   textContainer lineBreakMode    byTruncatingTail  Handy tip if you want zero height  when  there s no text at all Often you use a text view to only display text  So  you use lines  quot 0 quot  to mean the text view will automatically change height depending on how many lines of text  That s great  But if there is no text at all  then unfortunately you get the same height as if there is one line of text     The text view never  quot goes away quot    If you want it to  quot go away quot   just add this override var intrinsicContentSize  CGSize       var i   super intrinsicContentSize     print  quot for   text  size will be   i  quot       if text     quot  quot    i height   1 0       print  quot    but we changed it to   i  quot       return i      I made it  1  height so it s clear what s going on in that demo   0  is fine   What about UILabel   When just displaying text  UILabel has many advantages over UITextView  UILabel does not suffer from the problems described on this QA page  Indeed the reason we all usually  quot give up quot  and just use UITextView is that UILabel is difficult to work with  In particular it is ridiculously difficult to just add padding  correctly  to UILabel  In fact here is a full discussion on how to  quot finally quot  correctly add padding to UILabel  https   stackoverflow com a 58876988 294884  In some cases if you are doing a difficult layout with dynamic height cells  it is sometimes better to do it the hard way with UILabel

User · Answer

For swift 4  Xcode 9  Use the following function can change the margin padding of the text in UITextView     public func UIEdgeInsetsMake   top  CGFloat    left  CGFloat    bottom  CGFloat    right  CGFloat  -  UIEdgeInsets   so in this case is   self textView  textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake 0  0  0  0

User · Answer

you can use textContainerInset property of UITextView   textView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake 10  10  10  10     top  left  bottom  right

User · Answer

For iOS 10  the following line works for the top and bottom padding removing   captionTextView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake 0  0  0  0

User · Answer

I have found one more approach  getting view with text from UITextView s subviews and setting it up in layoutSubview method of a subclass   -  void layoutSubviews        super layoutSubviews        const int textViewIndex   1      UIView  textView    self subviews objectAtIndex textViewIndex       textView frame   CGRectMake                                   kStatusViewContentOffset                                   0 0f                                   self bounds size width -  2 0f   kStatusViewContentOffset                                    self bounds size height - kStatusViewContentOffset

User · Answer

The textView scrolling also affect the position of the text and make it look like not vertically centered  I managed to center the text in the view by disabling the scrolling and setting the top inset to 0       textView scrollEnabled   NO      textView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake 0  textView textContainerInset left  textView textContainerInset bottom  textView textContainerInset right     For some reason I haven t figured it out yet  the cursor is still not centered before the typing begins  but the text centers immediately as I start typing

User · Answer

Building off some of the good answers already given  here is a purely Storyboard   Interface Builder-based solution that works in iOS 7 0   Set the UITextView s User Defined Runtime Attributes for the following keys   textContainer lineFragmentPadding textContainerInset

User · Answer

I would definitely avoid any answers involving hard-coded values  as the actual margins may change with user font-size settings  etc   Here is  user1687195 s answer  written without modifying the textContainer lineFragmentPadding  because the docs state this is not the intended usage    This works great for iOS 7 and later   self textView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake                                        0                                         -self textView textContainer lineFragmentPadding                                         0                                         -self textView textContainer lineFragmentPadding     This is effectively the same outcome  just a bit cleaner in that it doesn t misuse the lineFragmentPadding property

User · Answer

Here is an updated version of Fattie s very helpful answer  It adds 2 important lines that helped me get the layout working on iOS 10 and 11  and probably on lower ones  too     IBDesignable class UITextViewFixed  UITextView       override func layoutSubviews             super layoutSubviews           setup             func setup             translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints   true         textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsets zero         textContainer lineFragmentPadding   0         translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints   false           The important lines are the two translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints    lt true false gt  statements   This surprisingly removes all margins in all my circumstances     While the textView is not the first responder it could happen that there is some strange bottom margin that could not be solved using the sizeThatFits method that is mentioned in the accepted answer    When tapping into the textView suddenly the strange bottom margin disappeared and everything looked like it should  but only as soon as the textView has got firstResponder     So I read here on SO that enabling and disabling translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints does help when setting the frame bounds manually in between the calls   Fortunately this not only works with frame setting but with the 2 lines of setup   sandwiched between the two translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints calls     This for example is very helpful when calculating the frame of a view using systemLayoutSizeFitting on a UIView  Gives back the correct size  which previously it didn t    As in the original answer mentioned  Don t forget to turn off scrollEnabled in the Inspector  That solution does work properly in storyboard  as well as at runtime   That s it  now you re really done

User · Answer

firstNameTextField setContentVerticalAlignment UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentCenter

User · Answer

On iOS 5 UIEdgeInsetsMake -8 -8 -8 -8   seems to work great

User · Answer

Storyboard or Interface Builder solution using User Defined Runtime Attributes   Screenshots are of iOS 7 1  amp  iOS 6 1 with contentInset     -10  -5    0  0

User · Answer

For SwiftUI  If you are making your own TextView using UIViewRepresentable and want to control the padding  in your makeUIView function  simply do   uiTextView textContainerInset   UIEdgeInsets top  10  left  18  bottom  0  right  18   or whatever you want

User · Answer

For me  iOS 11  amp  Xcode 9 4 1  what worked magically was setting up textView font property to UIFont preferred forTextStyle UIFontTextStyle   style and also the first answer as mentioned by  Fattie  But the  Fattie answer did not work till I set the textView font property else UITextView keeps behaving erratically

User · Answer

This workaround was written in 2009 when IOS 3 0 was released  It no longer applies   I ran into the exact same problem  in the end I had to wind up using  nameField contentInset   UIEdgeInsetsMake -4 -8 0 0     where nameField is a UITextView   The font I happened to be using was Helvetica 16 point   Its only a custom solution for the particular field size I was drawing   This makes the left offset flush with the left side  and the top offset where I want it for the box its draw in    In addition  this only seems to apply to UITextViews where you are using the default aligment  ie   nameField textAlignment   NSTextAlignmentLeft    Align to the right for example and the UIEdgeInsetsMake seems to have no impact on the right edge at all   At very least  using the  contentInset property allows you to place your fields with the  correct  positions  and accommodate the deviations without offsetting your UITextViews

User · Answer

For iOS 7 0  I ve found that the contentInset trick no longer works  This is the code I used to get rid of the margin padding in iOS 7   This brings the left edge of the text to the left edge of the container   textView textContainer lineFragmentPadding   0   This causes the top of the text to align with the top of the container  textView textContainerInset    zero   Both Lines are needed to completely remove the margin padding

User · Answer

All these answers address the title question  but I wanted to propose some solutions for the problems presented in the body of the OP s question   Size of Text Content  A quick way to calculate the size of the text inside the UITextView is to use the NSLayoutManager   UITextView  textView  CGSize textSize    textView usedRectForTextContainer textView textContainer  size    This gives the total scrollable content  which may be bigger than the UITextView s frame  I found this to be much more accurate than textView contentSize since it actually calculates how much space the text takes up  For example  given an empty UITextView   textView frame size    width 246  height 50  textSize    width 10  height 16 701999999999998  textView contentSize    width 246  height 33  textView textContainerInset    top 8  left 0  bottom 8  right 0    Line Height  UIFont has a property that quickly allows you to get the line height for the given font  So you can quickly find the line height of the text in your UITextView with   UITextView  textView  CGFloat lineHeight   textView font lineHeight    Calculating Visible Text Size  Determining the amount of text that is actually visible is important for handling a  paging  effect  UITextView has a property called textContainerInset which actually is a margin between the actual UITextView frame and the text itself  To calculate the real height of the visible frame you can perform the following calculations   UITextView  textView  CGFloat textViewHeight   textView frame size height  UIEdgeInsets textInsets   textView textContainerInset  CGFloat textHeight   textViewHeight - textInsets top - textInsets bottom    Determining Paging Size  Lastly  now that you have the visible text size and the content  you can quickly determine what your offsets should be by subtracting the textHeight from the textSize      where n is the page number you want CGFloat pageOffsetY   textSize - textHeight    n - 1   textView contentOffset   CGPointMake textView contentOffset x  pageOffsetY       examples CGFloat page1Offset   0  CGFloat page2Offset   textSize - textHeight CGFloat page3Offset   textSize - textHeight   2   Using all of these methods  I didn t touch my insets and I was able to go to the caret or wherever in the text that I want

[ios] How to lose margin/padding in UITextView?

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