Adding Insets to a UILabel

I ran into a situation at work today, where I was already using a UILabel to display text, but it was styled in a way that really needed some padding.

UILabel doesn’t directly support this, and the most common way to get around it is to embed the UILabel inside a UIView, and control the constraints that way. I didn’t really want to do that for what I was doing, and I also wanted to just make my own label that could handle padding.

It didn’t take long and was a lot more straightforward than I thought. I subclasses UIClass, added a UIEdgeInsets variable, and then made sure that intrinsicContentSize, sizeThatFits(_ size: CGSize), and drawText(in rect: CGRect) took that into consideration. So it still works perfectly with AutoLayout.

It’s certainly not a major open source project or anything, but it could be a quick way to add padding support to a UILabel!