[3R1C]

Im trying to figure out how provide a pad of whitespace in nstableview cells ala iTunes. My latest idea was to write a formatter which added a space at the front and back of each cells contents. Imagine my chagrin when I found that NSFormatters drop leading and trailing spaces when returning the formatted cell. Is there some esoteric key sequence I can use to put something at the front and back of my format string, that will not show up in the table cell, yet will still be there in the cell so that nsformatter wont drop it off? Does this make any sense? For instance ive tried these chars to pad my formatter with no joy. space, option space, shifted space. These are all summarily lopped off by the tableView. Is my only recourse to "subclass" NSCell? I put that in quotes, because subclassing is something im a hack at best at. It took me a week to subclass NSSplitView to snap shut/open on double click. I really feel like there must be some invisible char which i can put into my NSFormatter that it wont lop off. As a matter of fact, who exactly _is_ lopping of my spaces? NSTableView? NSFormatter? Im guessing its the NSCell. I dunno... At this point I suppose Im just rambling.

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

[bewebste]

Subclassing NSCell is probably the easiest way to go about this. There is a good example of how to implement this in /Developer/Examples/AppKit/DragNDropOutlineView. Take a look specifically at the awakeFromNib method in the AppController, where the setup is done, and the ImageAndTextCell subclass which performs the custom drawing. What you want to do is really very similar to this, except that you want a blank space instead of an image in the cell.