[kman42]

How do I go about making a string bold or italic? NSFormatter seems to be just for numbers, dates or custom things. Is there an easy way to format strings? I just want to format the second item in bold and the last item in italics:

[referenceJournal setStringValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@, %@:%@, pp. %@", [currentReference valueForKey:@"articleJournal"],[currentReference valueForKey:@"articleVolume"],[currentReference valueForKey:@"articleIssue"],[currentReference valueForKey:@"articlePages"]]];

kman

[Rickster]

NSFormatter's primary purpose is the kind of formatting that means turning the number 192 into the string "$ 192.00" for use in text fields or table cells. However, it can to rich text formatting too -- for example, if you had a table of numbers being formatted as dollar amounts, you may want to have it do negative numbers in red. That's when you'd want to override -attributedStringForObjectValue:defaultAttributes: in an NSFormatter subclass.

But anyway, that doesn't seem to be what you're asking about. Looks like you've got an NSTextField whose contents you want to add text styles to, right? What you want for that is to call -setAttributedStringValue: on the text field instead of -setStringValue:. NSAttributedString is the class for manipulating rich text in Cocoa -- it's modeled as a plain string accompanied by a dictionary of information that says "this part is bold, this other part is red". See its class documentation for info on how to construct one that has all the information an formatting you want.