What happened to “HelveticaNeue-Italic” on iOS 7.0.3

Question

Just upgraded my iPod touch to iOS 7.0.3 and \"HelveticaNeue-Italic\" seems to have disappeared. When I query on the phone with:

[UIFont fontNamesForFamilyN         


        

Answer 1

Since no one has mentioned anything about HelveticaNeue italic support in UIWebView, I thought I'd share my findings.

As of 7.0.6, the regular italic is still missing in UIWebView and appears to fall back to UltraLightItalic in the same family. This looks a little weird when it's right next to regular weight non-italic HelveticaNeue text since it is so much lighter.

My workaround was to use ordinary Helvetica instead of HelveticaNeue, but only for the italics. So if you have CSS that looks like this:

.myCssClass {
    font-family:HelveticaNeue;
    /* etc, etc */
}

...you would add two other classes to override <i> and <em>:

.myCssClass i  { font-family:Helvetica; }
.myCssClass em { font-family:Helvetica; }

The regular Helvetica italic font looks fine and I don't think anyone would notice that it's not HelveticaNeue.

Answer 2

This is a bug in iOS 7.0.3.

If you are explicitly using HelveticaNeue-Italic, then you can create it using this workaround:

UIFont* font = (__bridge_transfer UIFont*)CTFontCreateWithName(CFSTR("HelveticaNeue-Italic"), fontSize, NULL);

Note, however, that this workaround will only work on iOS 7; it is not deployable to iOS 6 (because CTFontRef and UIFont were not toll-free bridged on iOS 6). However, on iOS 6 you can just use your regular font lookup code.

Answer 3

I've found another solution that seems to work. I logged out a call to

[[UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:12.0] fontName]

to see what the actual system italic font being used is, and it returned ".HelveticaNeueInterface-ItalicM3". A simple test shows that using

[UIFont fontWithName:@".HelveticaNeueInterface-ItalicM3" size:12.0]

works! Comparing them visually, the font returned by the above call appears to be exactly the same as the original 'HelveticaNeue-Italic' font.

This problem is almost certainly a bug... Helvetica Neue is the default font in iOS 7, so fonts in that family shouldn't be missing. Everything worked fine in Xcode v.5.0, but immediately after upgrading to 5.0.1, this issue started appearing. I've filed a bug with Apple noting as much. Until then, this solution seems to work...

Answer 4

The bug seems to have been fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 1. [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Italic" size:size]; returns a font.

Answer 5

This is an Apple bug. It was introduced in iOS 7.0.3 and has not yet been fixed as of iOS 7.0.4. It appears to be fixed in the developer preview of iOS 7.1. Here is code (provided by Apple in the dev forums) to workaround the issue:

#import <CoreText/CoreText.h>

CGFloat size = 14;
UIFont *font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Italic" size:size];
if (font == nil && ([UIFontDescriptor class] != nil)) {
    font = (__bridge_transfer UIFont*)CTFontCreateWithName(CFSTR("HelveticaNeue-Italic"), size, NULL);
}

It is also worth noting that in the current version of Xcode (5.0.1 (5A2053)) this font is not listed as an option in the Font drop down list in Interface Builder. So if you previously configured a label with this font you will notice that the ui is confused and the label ends up being assigned some other font and size at runtime (see ui screencap below). For labels configured in storyboards/xibs you will need to reset the font in code.

For reference here is the discussion of the issue in the dev forums.

Answer 6

I currently don't find the session but they said something that you can not rely on fonts being available anymore on iOS7. They can even change during the lifetime of your app. Which basically means: When you specify fonts in your app, you are screwed, use font descriptors or preferred fonts instead!