Core Text Reference Collection

This collection of documents is the API reference for the Core Text framework. Core Text provides a modern, low-level programming interface for laying out text and handling fonts. The Core Text layout engine is designed for high performance, ease of use, and close integration with Core Foundation. The text layout API provides high-quality typesetting, including character-to-glyph conversion, with ligatures, kerning, and so on. It easily fills frames with typeset text and provides access to lines, glyph runs, and individual glyphs. It also enables control of line breaking, paragraph styles, tab settings, and many other aspects of the typesetting process.

The complementary Core Text font technology is designed to handle Unicode fonts natively and comprehensively, giving Carbon developers font technology equivalent to that of Cocoa. It provides automatic font substitution (cascading), font descriptors and collections, easy access to font metrics and glyph data, and many other features.