Blank Space at Top of Uitextview in iOS 10

Blank space at top of UITextView in iOS 10

A text view is a scroll view. View controllers will add a content offset automatically to scroll views, as it is assumed they will want to scroll up behind the nav bar and status bar.

To prevent this, set the following property on the view controller containing the text view:

self.automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets = NO

How to lose margin/padding in UITextView

Up-to-date for 2021

It is one of the silliest bugs in iOS.

The class given here, UITextViewFixed , is used widely, and is usually the most reasonable solution overall.

Here is the class:

@IBDesignable class UITextViewFixed: UITextView {
    override func layoutSubviews() {
        super.layoutSubviews()
        setup()
    }
    func setup() {
        textContainerInset = UIEdgeInsets.zero
        textContainer.lineFragmentPadding = 0
    }
}

Don't forget to turn off scrollEnabled in the Inspector!

1. The solution works properly in storyboard

2. The solution works properly at runtime

That's it, you're done.

In general, that should be all you need in most cases.

Even if you are changing the height of the text view on the fly, UITextViewFixed usually does all you need.

(A common example of changing the height on the fly, is changing it as the user types.)

Here is the broken UITextView from Apple...

Here is UITextViewFixed:

Note that of course you must...

...turn off scrollEnabled in the Inspector!

(Turning on scrollEnabled means "make this view expand as much as possible vertically by expanding the bottom margin as much as possible.")

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Some further issues

(1) In some very unusual cases dynamically changing heights, Apple does a bizarre thing: they add extra space at the bottom.

No, really! This would have to be one of the most infuriating things in iOS.

If you encounter the problem, here is a "quick fix" which usually helps:

...
        textContainerInset = UIEdgeInsets.zero
        textContainer.lineFragmentPadding = 0

        // this is not ideal, but sometimes this "quick fix"
        // will solve the "extra space at the bottom" insanity:
        var b = bounds
        let h = sizeThatFits(CGSize(
           width: bounds.size.width,
           height: CGFloat.greatestFiniteMagnitude)
       ).height
       b.size.height = h
       bounds = b
 ...

(2) In rare cases, to fix yet another subtle mess-up by Apple, you have to add:

override func setContentOffset(_ contentOffset: CGPoint, animated: Bool) {
    super.setContentOffset(contentOffset, animated: false) // sic
}

(3) Arguably, we should be adding:

contentInset = UIEdgeInsets.zero

just after .lineFragmentPadding = 0 in UITextViewFixed.

However ... believe or not ... that just doesn't work in current iOS! (Checked 2021.) It may be necessary to add that line in the future.

The fact that UITextView is broken in iOS is one of the weirdest things in all of mobile computing. Ten year anniversary of this question and it's still not fixed!

Finally, here's a somewhat similar tip for TextField: Set the maximum character length of a UITextField in Swift

Completely random tip: how to add the "..." on the end

Often you are using a UITextView "like a UILabel". So you want it to truncate text using an ellipsis, "..."

If so, add:

 textContainer.lineBreakMode = .byTruncatingTail

Handy tip if you want zero height, when, there's no text at all

Often you use a text view to only display text. So, you use lines "0" to mean the text view will automatically change height depending on how many lines of text.

That's great. But if there is no text at all, then unfortunately you get the same height as if there is one line of text!!!! The text view never "goes away".

If you want it to "go away", just add this

override var intrinsicContentSize: CGSize {
    var i = super.intrinsicContentSize
    print("for \(text) size will be \(i)")
    if text == "" { i.height = 1.0 }
    print("   but we changed it to \(i)")
    return i
}

(I made it '1' height, so it's clear what's going on in that demo, '0' is fine.)

What about UILabel?

When just displaying text, UILabel has many advantages over UITextView. UILabel does not suffer from the problems described on this Q&A page.

Indeed the reason we all usually "give up" and just use UITextView is that UILabel is difficult to work with. In particular it is ridiculously difficult to just add padding, correctly, to UILabel.

In fact here is a full discussion on how to "finally" correctly add padding to UILabel: Adding space/padding to a UILabel. In some cases if you are doing a difficult layout with dynamic height cells, it is sometimes better to do it the hard way with UILabel.

Whitespace at the top of a UIViewController

This is because when you are having a navigation bar & then dragging UITextView inside the viewController, UITextView makes sure you have that much whitespace at the top of it for visibility of the navigation bar.

If you remove the navigation bar then you will notice the whitespace gets removed. Its Xcode's way of ensuring that once you include a navigation bar in a ViewController, you will have that space reserved for the Nav bar, no matter if you include the UITextView including the navigation bar above it in storyboard.

This is not a documented answer, I have encountered this same problem & this is the only logical explanation there can be.

UITextView text not starting from top

Set the Content Inset like this in your UITextView

youtextView.contentInset = UIEdgeInsetsMake(-7.0,0.0,0,0.0);

Adjust the Top value the way you want. this shoud fix your problem.

EDIT:

If you're having issues with iOS7 or above, try using...

[yourTextView setContentOffset: CGPointMake(x,y) animated:BOOL];

IOS - remove ALL padding from UITextView

Although it is iOS 7 only, an extremely clean solution is to set the textView's textContainerInsets as such:

[textView setTextContainerInset:UIEdgeInsetsZero];
textView.textContainer.lineFragmentPadding = 0; // to remove left padding

This will effectively remove all padding (insets) around the text inside the text view. If your deployment target is iOS 7+ then this is the best solution thus far.

Two blank space in UITextView automatically inserts a . (fullstop) after text in iPhone

- (BOOL)textView:(UITextView *)textView shouldChangeTextInRange:(NSRange)range replacementText:(NSString *)text
{
//Check for double space
return !(range.location > 0 &&
         [text length] > 0 &&
         [[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet] characterIsMember:[text characterAtIndex:0]] &&
         [[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet] characterIsMember:[[textView text] characterAtIndex:range.location - 1]]);

}

Above code will limit user to enter more than one blank space.

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