How to set heading, subheading, body, footnote, and captions font for dynamic type text styles in Swift?

Question

I was working through the Using Text Kit to Manage Text in Your iOS Apps tutorial. It was written for Objective C but I thought I would try to do it anyway using Swift.

However, when I got to the following code I couldn't figure out how to set the heading and other styles for the UITextView using Swift. Here is the Objective C code:

- (IBAction)applyHeadlineStyle:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleHeadline]];
}

- (IBAction)applySubHeadlineStyle:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleSubheadline]];
}

- (IBAction)applyBodyStyle:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleBody]];
}

- (IBAction)applyFootnoteStyle:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleFootnote]];
}

- (IBAction)applyCaption1Style:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleCaption1]];
}

- (IBAction)applyCaption2Style:(id)sender {
    [_textView setFont:[UIFont preferredFontForTextStyle:UIFontTextStyleCaption2]];
}

I tried

textView.setFont =
textView.preferredFontForTextStyle =

Neither of these seemed to work, though, and I couldn't find any Swift answers on SO.

Transcendental

Xcode auto completes it for you. Start writing it and then press escape. Give it a try. – Spica

My problem was that setFont and preferredFontForTextStyle are not methods or properties of UITextView so there was nothing to autocomplete. I was just guessing. I did find a solution on another website though. – Transcendental

You will notice a lot of methods just don't have the word set as it is not necessary try it always without "set" – Spica

Answer 1

This tutorial had some code samples that showed how to do it.

// headline
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.headline)

// subheadline
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.subheadline)

// body
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.body)

// footnote
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.footnote)

// caption 1
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.caption1)

// caption 2
textView.font = UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFont.TextStyle.caption2)

See also

• Setting the font programmatically

Transcendental

how can i undo set style – Peterson