Quartz 2d / Core Graphics: What is the right way to draw some text?

Question

I've been at this for awhile, it seems that there's many ways to go about this in quartz 2d:

1) Draw text using core graphics methods...

CGContextSelectFont
CGContextSetRGBFillColor
CGContextShowTextAtPoint

and on and on, which is horribly low level.

2) using NSString drawAtPoint

(so far the method I like)

NSString* text = @"Hello";
[text drawAtPoint:point withFont:font];

3) using UILabel

I've read this somewhere but not too sure if this is possible. but I'm thinking that instantiating a UILabel within drawRect would be pretty costly as drawRect probably gets called a zillion times. ??

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I'm doing ok with 2. (using NSString drawAtPoint) for the moment but I wanted to get some opinions. Again, I'm trying to create text within drawRect (I subclassed a view) because I'm also drawing shapes along with text, what is the right way?

Thanks

Answer 1

#1 doesn't support international characters. So, don't use it if you use it to draw texts inputted by a user.

So, please use #2 unless you're absolutely sure that the text only contains standard ASCII characters.

Answer 2

#2 is how I generally do it unless I need the more precise control of using CG/CT

Answer 3

While I agree with Yuji that you should not use #1, I would add that if at all possible you should use a UILabel instead of custom drawing, because if you can avoid implementing -drawRect: at all, anywhere, you should.