Bug in custom fonts on iOS?

[Ken Ray]

> 
> Doing a 'Get Info' for those fonts, they all come up with names like this:
> 
> Myriad Pro-Cond
> Myriad Pro-Bold
> Myriad Pro-Italic
> etc...
> 
> Using my calibrated eye, the hyphen between 'Myriad Pro' and 'Cond' 
> looks like an em-dash.  Could that break things?
> 
> Has anyone else seen this problem?  (bonus: anyone have a work around?)

It's not a bug, technically, but an idiosyncracy of working with mobile - this is referenced loosely in the iOS Deployment Release Notes (page 13), but here's the skinny:

Fonts are assigned using the internal font name of a specific weight of a font (like "AmericanTypewriter-CondensedLight"), but that is not in "the fontNames"; it's in "the fontStyles" for a specific font, so to verify that you are setting a font properly, you have to check the fontStyles of every font.

For example, you can set the textFont of a field in the IDE to "Palatino", but when you move the app to iOS, the textFont of the field is actually "Palatino-Roman", which is one of the fontStyles of the Palatino font.

So for your app, if you want to display the different weights of the font, on iOS you'd say:

  put the fontStyles("Myriad Pro",0) into tFontWeights 

… which would give you back "Myriad Pro-Cond", "Myriad Pro-Bold", etc.

What I've done for my application is to create a lookup table that I store in a custom property of my stack that maps these "weights" to names I want to have appear in a font menu. So for example, you could have:

Myriad Pro-Cond = Myriad Pro Condensed
Myriad Pro-Bold = Myriad Pro Bold
(etc.)

and then when someone picks "Myriad Pro Condensed" from the font menu, you do the lookup, find out that the weight is actually "Myriad Pro-Cond" and execute:

  set the textfont of <whatever> to "Myriad Pro-Cond"

A pain, but it works…


Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/