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 fontNamesForFamilyName:@"Helvetica Neue"]

I get the following fontNames (13):

HelveticaNeue-BoldItalic,
HelveticaNeue-Light,
HelveticaNeue-UltraLightItalic,
HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold,
HelveticaNeue-MediumItalic,
HelveticaNeue-Thin,
HelveticaNeue-Medium,
HelveticaNeue-ThinItalic,
HelveticaNeue-LightItalic,
HelveticaNeue-UltraLight,
HelveticaNeue-Bold,
HelveticaNeue,
HelveticaNeue-CondensedBlack

When I do the same query running in the simulator I get (14):

HelveticaNeue-BoldItalic,
HelveticaNeue-Light,
**HelveticaNeue-Italic,**
HelveticaNeue-UltraLightItalic,
HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold,
HelveticaNeue-MediumItalic,
HelveticaNeue-Thin,
HelveticaNeue-Medium,
HelveticaNeue-Thin_Italic,
HelveticaNeue-LightItalic,
HelveticaNeue-UltraLight,
HelveticaNeue-Bold,
HelveticaNeue,
HelveticaNeue-CondensedBlack

Anyone else see this?

---- New Information ----

I went back to the WWDC 2013 video "Using Font with Text Kit" and the interesting part starts at 12:22. The presenter talks about "MetaFonts" in OS X as an example. What he says is that the font under calls like:

+ (NSFont *)messageFontOfSize:(CGFloat)fontSize

are not guaranteed to return the same underlying font across versions or even different uses. His example was Lucinda Grande. He did not seem to be saying that using "HelveticaNeue-Italic" could go away from version to version.

So I constructed an experiment in iOS 7. I created my font with the following code:

UIFontDescriptor *fontDescriptor = [UIFontDescriptor fontDescriptorWithName:@"Helvetica Neue" size:16.0];
UIFontDescriptor *symbolicFontDescriptor = [fontDescriptor fontDescriptorWithSymbolicTraits:UIFontDescriptorTraitItalic];

UIFont *fontWithDescriptor = [UIFont fontWithDescriptor:symbolicFontDescriptor size:16.0];

I did get a valid UIFont back for fontWithDescriptor and when I queried the font for the fontName with:

[fontWithDescriptor fontName]

I got back...

HelveticaNeue-Italic

Go figure???

So a possible answer to 7.0.3 seems to be the code above.

---- Further Tweak ----

Although the solution worked above, I don't think it is formally correct. I have switched to the following solution

    UIFontDescriptor *fontDescriptor = [[UIFontDescriptor alloc] init];

    UIFontDescriptor *fontDescriptorForHelveticaNeue = [fontDescriptor fontDescriptorWithFamily:@"Helvetica Neue"];
    UIFontDescriptor *symbolicFontDescriptor = [fontDescriptorForHelveticaNeue fontDescriptorWithSymbolicTraits:UIFontDescriptorTraitItalic];

    textFont = [UIFont fontWithDescriptor:symbolicFontDescriptor size:textFontPointSize];

This appears to do all the right things. I tried the previous approach with another font family and it seemed to get confused with a the fontName and the fontFamily. Hope this helps!

Answer 1

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 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

It is my belief that it is a bug. I have filed it as such with Apple. Sadly for me, my app is now crashing. The font is used in a 3rd party library I am using. Many folks on Twitter are reporting problems.

Answer 4

If you are dynamically accessing the italic font then instead of accessing the font by name [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Italic" size:15.0f] use [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:15.0f] this is working fine for me.

Answer 5

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!

Answer 6

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 7

The bug report I filed with Apple has been marked "Closed as duplicate". I am hopeful that means they do consider it a bug. However, iOS 7.0.4 does not fix the bug.

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

I had a same crash which used be to crash in iOS 7.0.3 & 7.0.4 only, and works perfectly in all other versions. After so much investigation, I came to know that @"HelveticaNeue-Italic" is not available in iOS 7.0.3 & 7.0.4 versions, so that I used to get above crash in those versions.

I have fixed the issue with below code, this might helpful to someone needy.

self.headerFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Italic" size:16.0f];
if (self.headerFont == nil) {
    self.headerFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue" size:16.0f];
}

The crash log is:

[__NSCFConstantString pointSize]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 

Answer 10

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.