My good friend google told me that using a custom font in iOS is “easy”. And for the most part it is, but I got tripped up in a few places. I happen to have Apples Keychain example code lying around so I’ll be using that in this example. I am also using Xcode 4.5 and focusing on iOS 5.1, and iOS 6.

Adding the font to your project

Drag the .ttf file to your project.

Make sure “Add to targets” is checked.

Verify the font is in the project. There are two places you can do this.

By selecting the font, and verifying “Target Membership” in the Utilities area.

And By selecting your apps target, selecting the “Build Phases” tab, and verifying that your font is in the “Copy Bundle Resources” section.

And finally, add the font to your Info.plist. Note that most apps change the name of their plist to something like <ProjectName>-Info.plist. Add a key of “Fonts provided by application”, and make sure it’s an array, then add your font file name as an item in the array. Make sure you use the exact file name, and that your file name has an all-lowercase extension (.TTF apparently doesn’t work on iPhones, but .ttf does).

Knowing your font

This is where I had some issues. When you add your font you use the file name, but when you use your font you use the font name… The EXACT font name. If you ctrl + click on the .ttf file and select “Get Info”, you can find the “Full Name”. That seems to work with a lot of fonts, but the font I’m using doesn’t work that way. I had to open the .ttf file in the Font Book application, and look at the window header.

Using this name, you can log what font names you have available by using the fontNamesForFamilyName method like so:


NSLog(@"tt0001m_: %@",
[UIFont fontNamesForFamilyName:@"Swis721 Lt BT"]
);


Which gives the output:
2012-08-24 11:25:10.968 GenericKeychain[7260:c07] tt0001m_: (
"Swiss721BT-Light"
)

Using your font programmatically

Say you have a UILabel:

UILabel *myLabel = [[UILabel alloc] init];
[myLabel setText:@"Label Text"];


We set the font of our label by creating a UIFont, and setting it to our label with setFont.

UIFont *swissLight = [UIFont
fontWithName:@"Swiss721BT-Light"
size:myLabel.font.pointSize];
[myLabel setFont:swissLight];


Using your font in Interface Builder

This is an interesting solution that I got from stackoverflow. First you need to create a subclass of UILabel. Hit Cmd + N (or go to File > New > File…), select “Cocoa Touch” > “Objective-C class”, and hit “Next”. Name your class something like CustomFontSwissLightLabel and choose UILabel in the “Subclass of” section. Open your CustomFontSwissLightLabel.m file and override the awakeFromNib method like so:

- (void)awakeFromNib {
[super awakeFromNib];
self.font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Swiss721BT-Light"
size:self.font.pointSize];
}

Now add a UILabel to you .xib file. In the “Utilities” area, under the “Identity Inspector” tab change the Class from UILabel to CustomFontSwissLightLabel.

That’s all there is to it. 

It really is pretty easy, but there are a handful of things that can trip you up, and I wrote this blog post because I got tripped up on every one of them :)