How do I make a specific portion of a UILabel
look like a blockquote, or have there be a vertical line on the left side of the text? Would TextKit come in here? If so, how?
Mail.app does this (see the colored portions and the line on the side of them):
How would I replicate this effect without using multiple UILabel
s (which as I'm creating it dynamically would be rather gross)?
If you are targeting iOS lower than 7, You can do somethingsimilar by using Core Text, but since Core Text is kind of old C opaque types implementation, I suggest you to use DTCoreText.
If you are using >=iOS7 you can use NSAttributed string and NSXMLDocument. Even if attributed string are available from 3.x they only added them into UIKIT objects into ios6 and changed radically the UIKit behavior in managing them into iOS7.
NSXMLDocument it's helpful because you can render your string representing them as HTML.