Is it possible to alter the letter-spacing/kerning of a font with Cocoa Touch?

Question

I\'ve been scouring the Internet for a while now for information on how one can alter the letter-spacing/kerning of a font within UIKit.

My fear is, that like using

Answer 1

The accepted answer lost a lot of the formatting, and user363349's answer mostly worked for me but text alignment wasn't working. I modified the code to fix that:

- (void) drawRect:(CGRect)rect
{
    // Drawing code
    CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
    CGContextSelectFont (context, [self.font.fontName cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding], self.font.pointSize, kCGEncodingMacRoman);
    CGContextSetCharacterSpacing(context, characterSpacing);
    CGContextSetFillColorWithColor(context, [[UIColor clearColor] CGColor]);
    CGAffineTransform myTextTransform = CGAffineTransformScale(CGAffineTransformIdentity, 1.f, -1.f );

    CGContextSetTextMatrix (context, myTextTransform);

    // draw 1 but invisbly to get the string length.
    CGPoint p =CGContextGetTextPosition(context);
    float centeredY = (self.font.pointSize + (self.frame.size.height- self.font.pointSize)/2)-2;
    CGContextShowTextAtPoint(context, 0, centeredY, [self.text cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding], [self.text length]);
    CGPoint v =CGContextGetTextPosition(context);

    // calculate width and draw second one.
    float width = v.x - p.x;
    float destX = 0;

    // calculate X position based on alignment
    if([self textAlignment] == UITextAlignmentLeft){
        destX = 0;
    }else if([self textAlignment] == UITextAlignmentCenter){
        destX = (self.frame.size.width- width)/2;
    }else if([self textAlignment] == UITextAlignmentRight){
        destX = self.frame.size.width - width;
    }
    CGContextSetFillColorWithColor(context, [self.textColor CGColor]);
    CGContextShowTextAtPoint(context, destX, centeredY, [self.text cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding], [self.text length]);
}