I'm just getting started on a new iPhone/iPad development project, and I need to display a document with rich styled text (potentially with embedded images). The user will touch the document, dragging to highlight individual words or multiline text spans. When the text is highlighted, a context menu will appear, letting them change the color of highlighting or add margin notes (or other various bits of structured metadata).

If you're familiar with adding comments to a Word document (or annotating a PDF), then this is the same sort of thing. But in my case, the typical user will spend many many hours within the app, adding thousands (in some cases, tens of thousands) of small annotations to the central document. All of those bits of metadata will be stored locally awaiting synchronization with a remote web service.

I've read other pieces of advice, where developers suggest creating a UIWebView control and passing it an HTML string. But that seems kind of clunky, especially with all the context-sensitivity that I want to include.

Anyhow, I'm brand new to iPhone development and Objective-C, though I have ten years of software development experience, using a variety of languages on many different platforms, so I'm not worried about getting my hands dirty writing new functionality from scratch.

But if anyone has experience building a similar kind of component, I'm interested in hearing strategies for enabling that kind of rich document markup and annotation.