NSTextView, NSFontManager, and changeAttributes()

Question

So I have this app that I'm writing to get familiar with Swift and programming for OSX. It's a note-taking app. The note window consists of an NSTextView and a button that brings up an NSFontPanel.

Changing the font works great. Selecting a size? No problem. Want to change attributes of the font like color, underlining, etc? I'm not at all sure how to get this to work.

Other sources ( here and here , for example) seem to suggest that NSTextView should be the target of NSFontManager and that NSTextView has it's own implementation of changeAttributes(). Making NSTextView the target, however, does nothing. When I select text in NSTextView and bring up the font panel, the first selection I make in the fontPanel results in deselection of the text.

Making my view controller the target for NSFontManager and implementing a stub for changeAttributes yields an object of type NSFontEffectsBox which I am unable to find any good documentation for.

Question is... what am I supposed to do with NSFontEffectsBox? If in the fontPanel I select blue text with double underline, I can see those attributes in the debugger but I'm unable to access them programatically.

Here's the relevant code:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    loadNoteIntoInterface()
    noteBody.keyDelegate = self  // noteBody is the NSTextView
    noteBody.delegate = self
    noteBody.usesFontPanel = true
    fontManager = NSFontManager.sharedFontManager()
    fontManager!.target = self
}

Code for changing the font. This works just fine.

override func changeFont(sender: AnyObject?) {
    let fm = sender as! NSFontManager
    if noteBody.selectedRange().length>0 {
        let theFont = fm.convertFont((noteBody.textStorage?.font)!)
        noteBody.textStorage?.setAttributes([NSFontAttributeName: theFont], range: noteBody.selectedRange())
    }
}

Stub code for changeAttributes:

func changeAttributes(sender: AnyObject) {
    print(sender)
}

So.. my goals are two:

1. Understand what's going on here
2. have any changes I make in the fontPanel be reflected in the NSTextView selected text.

Thank you.

Answer 1

So I did manage to find an answer of sorts. Here's how I implemented changeAttributes() in my program:

func changeAttributes(sender: AnyObject) {
    var newAttributes = sender.convertAttributes([String : AnyObject]())
    newAttributes["NSForegroundColorAttributeName"] = newAttributes["NSColor"]
    newAttributes["NSUnderlineStyleAttributeName"] = newAttributes["NSUnderline"]
    newAttributes["NSStrikethroughStyleAttributeName"] = newAttributes["NSStrikethrough"]
    newAttributes["NSUnderlineColorAttributeName"] = newAttributes["NSUnderlineColor"]
    newAttributes["NSStrikethroughColorAttributeName"] = newAttributes["NSStrikethroughColor"]

    print(newAttributes)

    if noteBody.selectedRange().length>0 {
        noteBody.textStorage?.addAttributes(newAttributes, range: noteBody.selectedRange())
    }
}

Calling convertAttributes() on sender returns an attribute array, but the names don't seem to be what NSAttributedString is looking for. So I just copy them from old name to new and send them on. This is a good start, but I will probably remove the old keys before adding the attributes.

The question remains, tho.. is this the right way to do things?