The system font on the iPhone is a good choice for many purposes. You can easily select it in a regular, bold or italic style using built-in font class methods. For example
UIFont *mainTitleFont = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:14.0];
UIFont *subTitleFont = [UIFont SystemFontOfSize:14.0];
UIFont *textFont = [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:12.0];
But what if you want a font using both bold and italic at the same time, or a different typeface altogether? In that case, you can use the “fontWithName” method as follows.
UIFont *altFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Courier-Bold" size:14.0];
This is all well and good, but how did you know what font names and variants are available? If you just guess and get the name wrong, your code will throw an exception – there is no graceful mapping to nearest available font here!
I couldn’t find the list of available font names anywhere in the iPhone documentation, or for that matter even with a web search (at least within the first few pages of returned results). So instead I wrote a small snippet of code to list them for me.
// List all fonts on iPhone
NSArray *familyNames = [[NSArray alloc] initWithArray:[UIFont familyNames]];
NSArray *fontNames;
NSInteger indFamily, indFont;
for (indFamily=0; indFamily<[familyNames count]; ++indFamily)
{
NSLog(@"Family name: %@", [familyNames objectAtIndex:indFamily]);
fontNames = [[NSArray alloc] initWithArray:
[UIFont fontNamesForFamilyName:
[familyNames objectAtIndex:indFamily]]];
for (indFont=0; indFont<[fontNames count]; ++indFont)
{
NSLog(@" Font name: %@", [fontNames objectAtIndex:indFont]);
}
[fontNames release];
}
[familyNames release];
Using the iPhone SDK v2.1, the resulting output was as follows.
Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W3
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W3
Family name: Courier
Font name: Courier
Font name: Courier-BoldOblique
Font name: Courier-Oblique
Font name: Courier-Bold
Family name: Arial
Font name: ArialMT
Font name: Arial-BoldMT
Font name: Arial-BoldItalicMT
Font name: Arial-ItalicMT
Family name: STHeiti TC
Font name: STHeitiTC-Light
Font name: STHeitiTC-Medium
Family name: AppleGothic
Font name: AppleGothic
Family name: Courier New
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPSMT
Family name: Zapfino
Font name: Zapfino
Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W6
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W6
Family name: Arial Unicode MS
Font name: ArialUnicodeMS
Family name: STHeiti SC
Font name: STHeitiSC-Medium
Font name: STHeitiSC-Light
Family name: American Typewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter-Bold
Family name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Oblique
Font name: Helvetica-BoldOblique
Font name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Bold
Family name: Marker Felt
Font name: MarkerFelt-Thin
Family name: Helvetica Neue
Font name: HelveticaNeue
Font name: HelveticaNeue-Bold
Family name: DB LCD Temp
Font name: DBLCDTempBlack
Family name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Bold
Font name: Verdana-BoldItalic
Font name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Italic
Family name: Times New Roman
Font name: TimesNewRomanPSMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
Family name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-Bold
Font name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-BoldItalic
Font name: Georgia-Italic
Family name: STHeiti J
Font name: STHeitiJ-Medium
Font name: STHeitiJ-Light
Family name: Arial Rounded MT Bold
Font name: ArialRoundedMTBold
Family name: Trebuchet MS
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Italic
Font name: TrebuchetMS
Font name: Trebuchet-BoldItalic
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Bold
Family name: STHeiti K
Font name: STHeitiK-Medium
Font name: STHeitiK-Light
So when choosing a non-system font, you just have to make sure that you choose a font name from this list. Whether or not the list of font will change in future iPhone OS updates remains to be seen. It may be worth re-running this code snippet to see.
Late Addition: For samples of each font’s appearance, see my more recent post.
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