UITextView - setting font not working with iOS 6 on XCode 5

I'm using storyboards for my UI. I was previously using XCode 4.6 and released on iOS 6. I have since updated to iOS 7 using XCode 5 and updated the Storyboard to work nicely with XCode 5. I have one issue though:

UITextView doesn't want to display font changes within code. Text colour changes work fine. Any other property changes are fine. Font, not at all. I was using a custom font, so I checked different fonts with different sizes (i.e. systemFontOfSize:) but that didn't work. The text view only shows the font that's set in the Storyboard. What could I be missing here? Are there any auto-layout constraints that mess with this sort of thing? I had a few issues with constraints during the migration, but as I said, the fonts work fine in iOS 7.

I guess it's something in the Storyboard that I'm missing, as if I create a UIViewController and add a text view in code, it works fine.

I'd put up some code, but I'm not sure it'd help at all in this case.


Even stranger, this only happens on iPhone, not iPad.

If you're setting the font in code and don't want an editable text view, do this:

textView.editable = YES;
textView.font = newFont;
textView.editable = NO;

In my case, it is matter of 'selectable' property of UITextView.

So I checked 'selectable' property of UITextView in Storyboard Editor to set it YES To set selectable

and later in viewWillAppear set this property to NO.

textview.text = @"some text";
textview.selectable = NO;

The issue was caused by the editable property being false in the Storyboard. I have absolutely no idea why this caused the font to remain unchanged - and only on iOS 6.


For me it's work if you set the text of your UITextView and after set the font (same for color) :

_myTextView.text = @"text";
[_myTextView setFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica Neue" size:18.0f]];
_myTextView.textColor = [UIColor whiteColor];

Thank you for all the answers guys. Issue is still present on iOS9. What i've found out, is that when you set "User Interaction Enabled = false" in the Interface Builder you can leave Editable and Selectable = true and user will not be able to edit a text view.

So, my solution is:

  1. Set User Interaction Enabled = False in IB
  2. Set Editable = True in IB
  3. Set Selectable = True in IB
  4. Configure your text view in whatever way you want.