Question

I cant get my .ttf file to work in my iPhone app. I added this file to my project:

gothamnarrowbook.ttf

I added this to my plist:

<key>UIAppFonts</key>
<array>
    <string>gothamnarrowbook.ttf</string>
</array>

And in my ViewController, I added this:

UIFont *gnb = [UIFont fontWithName:@"gothamnarrowbook" size:22];

But gnb is nil. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the actual ‘name’ of the font you reference in the .plist isn’t necessarily the same as its file-name.

To find out the real name of the font, open it in Font Book, and you should be able to see it’s real name. Maybe the actual name is “Gotham Narrow Book”, or something like that, Font Book will tell you.

Check out this blog post to find out more.

Also note that:

Using the name from Font Book works well enough for fonts with one
variant, but if your font has multiple variants, and you don’t want to
get involved with iOS’s seemingly incomplete implementation of
NSAttributedString, then you’ll have to specify the variant explicitly
when you load the font.

Using UIFont’s class method +fontNamesForFamilyName: you supply the
font family name, for example “Cloister Black” which might have two
variants “Light” and “Dark”, and it will return an NSArray of all
variants of that font, “CloisterBlack-Light” and “CloisterBlack-Dark”.
Notice no spaces.