UIAppFonts – custom fonts with the iPhone/iPad 3.2 SDK

Recently I had some problems getting custom fonts working with the new iPhone/iPad 3.2 SDK using Interface Builder. In the new SDK it’s supposed to be really easy in theory, but there is currently a bug with Interface Builder/xCode that ruins it. I’ll share my workaround how to get it to work and if you have better ideas – I would be really grateful to hear abut them.

First, the way it’s supposed to work:

  • Add the custom font to your Xcode project
  • Add the name of the *.ttf (I’ve also had success with *.ttc) file to your Info.plist under UIAppFonts (Array)
  • Set the font property of any UILabel to match your newly added font name (you can discover the actual font names by iterating over [UIFont familyNames] and [UIFont fontNamesForFamily])

When done manually in code it should look something like this:

// MyViewController.h
@interface MyViewController : UIViewController {
 UILabel *myLabel;
}

// connect with IB
@property(nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UILabel *myLabel;

@end

// MyViewController.m
@implementation MyViewController

@synthesize myLabel;

- (void) viewDidLoad {
 [myLabel setFont: [UIFont fontWithName: @"Quake" size: myLabel.font.pointSize]];
}

@end

While the above does work, connecting every UILabel manually to an IBOutlet and then implementing the same thing over and over again for each label seemed like a bad idea. My workaround was to define a custom UILabel subclass for each different custom font I needed to use (fortunately only 4) and then use those subclasses instead in Interface Builder:

// LabelQuake.h
#import <uikit /UIKit.h>
@interface LabelQuake : UILabel {

}

@end

// LabelQuake.m
#import "LabelQuake.h"
@implementation LabelQuake

- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder {
 
 if (self = [super initWithCoder: decoder]) {
 [self setFont: [UIFont fontWithName: @"Quake" size: self.font.pointSize]];
 }
 
 return self;
}


@end

This way my controllers don’t have to know about every label and it’s SEMI-DRY ;)

!PS: people not using IB, but building their UI in code should just ignore the above, everything should just work.
!PS: I’ll update this post when the bug gets updated/closed in Radar with more info.

Tarmo Lehtpuu
Tarmo is the swiss army knife Software Engineer. His deep knowledge on wide range of technologies makes him an efficient problem solver. In addition to Ruby on Rails, he enjoys developing iOS Apps.

21 Comments

  • alvin
    July 5, 2010 at 8:23 pm

    Should setFont be sent to the label instead of self in the UIViewController example?

    • Tarmo Lehtpuu
      July 6, 2010 at 12:49 pm

      Thanks alvin, fixed the typo.

  • Anthony
    July 14, 2010 at 12:49 am

    This is nice. Really nice.

  • Jamison Dance
    July 18, 2010 at 2:10 am

    Do you have a link to the bug report? I would like to follow the issue on Radar.

  • Tarmo Lehtpuu
    July 26, 2010 at 3:50 pm

    As far as I understand radar bug reports are only visible to Apple and the reporter. But the bug report ID is 7976255 and it’s marked as duplicate of 7672035. Hope that helps :)

  • YS
    August 25, 2010 at 6:55 pm

    Hi, thanks for the post. Will this work for adding foreign language support such a custom arabic font?

    • Mustafa
      September 8, 2011 at 7:09 am

      Just FYI, this method doesn’t work for custom arabic fonts (and arabic text). I tried to display the font using UILabel, UITextField, UITextView and FontLabel (by Zynga).

  • Jim
    September 8, 2010 at 12:10 pm

    Hi,
    I’m very new so this may seem like a dumb question. Where you have written ‘connect with IB’… how do I do that? I would suspect it’s a fairly simple matter of dragging a noodle but I am going to need some guidance to get this right.

    Thank you,
    Jim

  • Jehiah
    November 6, 2010 at 6:02 am

    can you cross-post your apple bug report to http://openradar.appspot.com/ ?

  • Vitaliy
    July 3, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    Thank you! It’s GREAT!

  • Kamleshwar
    July 21, 2011 at 9:49 am

    Really nice and informative article.

    Thanks and keep posting.

  • Sound and Code Creations LLC
    August 31, 2011 at 1:40 am

    Thanks for the post, very helpful.

    Have you noticed longer loading times with the custom subclass approach? I added Chalkduster font to my app and it caused the initial load to increase to 3 to 4 sec and some of my screens within the app to take similar time. Without the custom font it was much faster.

    Thanks,

  • Karunakar bandikatla
    October 27, 2011 at 8:46 am

    Thank you so much. It worked :)

  • Karim
    November 22, 2011 at 11:19 am

    Hi nice post done by you. Its great work. I tried this by ENGLISH it works fine. But i am trying to use for ARABIC font styles it does not work. Do you have any idea in ARABIC font styles please help me.

  • Gabriel
    February 15, 2012 at 5:35 am

    – (void)drawTextInRect:(CGRect)rect
    {
    [self setFont:[UIFont fontWithName: @”DINCond-Medium” size: self.font.pointSize]];
    [self setTextColor:[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@”FontBackground.png”]]];

    [super drawTextInRect:rect];
    }

  • John
    May 21, 2012 at 7:31 pm

    Your bit at the end about iterating through the fonts was excellent. I was having a rough time and then I realized I should check to see if the font was named something other than the name of the file I added and it happened that it was slightly different.

    Thanks!

  • Parashuram Bandaram
    November 28, 2012 at 1:06 pm

    Thank your for the post. This will works while we add Font in Resource folder and info.plist statically. But my case fonts will come dyanamically from server. So in runtime I need to save in Resource folder and edit the info.plist. This also I done for Label using Fontlabel lybrary. But I need for textfield. If have any idea kindly help me.

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