Question

I’ve always thought it was great that I could use simple iconic unicode characters in a string when I needed an arrow or a bullet or whatever. The glyphs would render in the same color as the rest of the string with a nice simple and clean icons. I could preview how they’d look by using the Mac’s “Special Characters” dialog on the Edit menu in XCode.

In iOS5, these glyphs render in full color and aren’t simple and clean. I believe these are Emoji icons?

I’m looking for an explanation of this change, and ideally how to force iOS5 to revert to the iOS2 – iOS4 behavior.

Here’s an example: @"← left arrow, right arrow → airplane ✈";

Edit:

Apparently the NSString UIKit extensions for rendering text (drawAtPoint: / drawInRect:) don’t exhibit this behavior. So perhaps it is a UILabel thing? Specifically I’ve noticed it inside a UISegmentControl segment button, and in a UILabel.

Answer 1

This isn’t a bug, it’s down to the font used. When you use a character in a string that isn’t available in the chosen font, iOS automatically substitutes a glyph from another font.

The system font (Helvetica) doesn’t have those characters in it, so I’m guessing that Apple have have changed the list of fallback fonts so that Emoji ranks above whatever it was using previously for the fallback for those characters.

To fix it, find a font that a) has the version of the characters you want in it, and b) is available on iPhone, and set your label to use that instead of the default system font.

Alternatively, you could just make a UILabel subclass and override the drawRect method so it uses the drawAtPoint/drawInRect methods to draw the string.