How to style text views with fonts, colors, line spacing, and more

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    September 18th 2019

Updated for Xcode 12.0

Not only do text views give us a predictably wide range of control in terms of how they look, they are also designed to work seamlessly alongside core Apple technologies such as Dynamic Type.

By default a Text view has a “Body” Dynamic Type style, but you can select from other sizes and weights by calling .font() on it like this:

Text("This is an extremely long text string that will never fit even the widest of Phones")
    .font(.largeTitle)

In particular, now that we have multiple lines you will want to adjust their text alignment so the lines are centered, like this:

Text("This is an extremely long text string that will never fit even the widest of Phones")
    .font(.largeTitle)
    .multilineTextAlignment(.center)

We can control the color of text using the .foregroundColor() modifier, like this:

Text("The best laid plans")
    .foregroundColor(Color.red)

You can also set the background color, but that uses .background() because it’s possible to use more advanced backgrounds than just a flat color. Anyway, to give our layout a yellow background color we would add this:

Text("The best laid plans")
    .background(Color.yellow)
    .foregroundColor(Color.red)

There are even more options. For example, we can adjust the line spacing in our text. The default value is 0, which means there is no extra line spacing applied, but you can also specify position values to add extra spacing between lines:

Text("This is an extremely long string that will never fit even the widest of Phones")
    .font(.largeTitle)
    .lineSpacing(50)

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