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copied!<p>For a while I thought this routine was simply broken. It sounds like it's the perfect routine for working out <em>how <strong>high</strong> a piece of text is, when wrapped at a certain width</em>. However this is not what it does. Indeed, the height returned is always a single line. (Which is pointless, incidentally: <code>UIFont</code>'s <code>-leading</code> returns the same value.)</p> <p>To quote the documentation at the time of writing:</p> <blockquote> <p>Although it computes where line breaks would occur, this method does not actually wrap the text to additional lines; [...]</p> </blockquote> <p>This sentence confused me for a long time. My thoughts ran along the lines of:</p> <ul> <li>Computing line-breaks, but not wrapping. Eh?</li> <li>Maybe they mean the receiving <code>NSString</code> itself won't be mutated to reflect line-breaks? But I don't expect that anyway?</li> <li>This sentence is not consistent with itself. I have no choice but to ignore it.</li> </ul> <p>However, it turns out there's a meaning that matches the behaviour we see. It seems that what they mean is:</p> <blockquote> <p>This routine will compute where the <em>first</em> line-break will occur, and all text after this is ignored for the purposes of calculating the bounding box.</p> </blockquote> <p>The bounding box returned will therefore have the height of a single line and a width up to the maximum specified. (The width may be less depending on where the line-break is calculated, or if the text is short enough that it does not need the maximum width.)</p> <p>To, um, answer the actual question: What is it good for? I haven't found anything useful myself: only things where I thought it would be useful, but wasn't. Some things which spring to mind, however, are:</p> <ul> <li>Centering a single-line piece of text. I'm thinking buttons and/or titles here. (Although <code>UILabel</code> and <code>UIButton</code> can do it, sometimes you want to draw it yourself.)</li> <li>Calculating the bounds for an "extract" of a longer piece of text. Here I'm thinking about where you might want to show a snippet of a much larger piece of text.</li> </ul>

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