AveFontHelpers

A few helpers to make working with Dynamic Type easier

What?

Using Dynamic Type in iOS sometimes can be verbose and trick when wanting to use custom fonts, designs or sizes. You have to to UIFontMetrics().scaleFont() and do everything in the right order. If you want to change the design of a font or go one point smaller, this gets annoying.

This small library provides a helper struct Font that can be turned into a dynamic type font easily.

Usage

The basis is the Font structure that you use to define your fonts using the following parameters:

• size the size in points
• maximumSize optional the maximum size of the font
• style optional the text style this font is based on, used for scaling. If size = 0, the iOS text style point size will be used
• weight: optional the weight of the font
• design optional the design of the font, for example .rounded
• traits optional traits for the font, e.g. .italic
• scalability optional, .fixed, .scalable or .placeholder. Fixed and placeholder fonts wont scale dynamically
• name: optional the name of the font family to use, if nil the system font will be used

You can define fonts like this:

extension Font {
    // we want a thinner large title
    let largeTitle = Font(style: .largeTitle, weight: .thin)
    
    // our custom body font, scales as the iOS body font
    let body = Font(size: 14, style: .body)
    
    // our custom button font, with a maximum size
    let button = Font(size: 13, maximumSize: 26, weight: .bold)
    
    // a tab bar font that doesn't scale
    let tabBarItem = Font(size: 11, scalalability: .fixed)
    let tabBarItem2 = Font.fixed(size: 12)
}

/// there are convenience inits() for UILabel, UITextView and UIButton 
let label = UILabel(font: .largeTitle)

// assigning a font can be done the .from() or 
let bodyLabel = UILabel()
bodyLabel.font = .from(body)
bodyLabel.font = Font.body.font()

To turn these items into UIFont, call .from(.largeTitle) or Font.largeTitle.font()

UILabel, UITextView, UIButton convenience inits

UIlabel, UITextView and UIButton all have convenience helpers that take a Font and automatically enabled dynamic type when needed:

let label = UILabel(text: "Some Text", font: .largeTitle, color: label, alignment: .center)
let textView = UITextView(font: .body, color: .secondaryLabel)
let button = UIButton(font: .button.smaller.rounded)

Modifiers

There are a lot of modifiers for composing fonts, some are shown in the example below:

let body = Font(size: 14, style: .body)

body.smaller // 1pt smaller
body.smaller(by: 5) // 5 pts smaller

body.larger // 1pt larger
body.larger(by: 5) // 5 pts larger

body.with(size: 12) // same font, but with size 12
body.with(weight: .bold) // same font, but bold
body.with(design: .rounded) // same font, but rounded
body.with(scalability: .fixed) // same font, but not scalable
body.with(traits: .italic) // same font, but italic only

body.bold.adding(traits: .italic) // same font, but italic and bold

body.bolder // a bolder font
body.rounded // a rounded font
body.thin // a thin font
body.italic // an italic font
body.fixed // a font that doesn't scale

iOS Text Styles

There are also equivalents of all iOS text styles, under .ios.:

let label = UILabel(font: .ios.largeTitle)
let bodyLabel = UILabel(font: .ios.body)
etc