ios - Custom installed font not displayed correctly in UILabel

Question

I'm trying to use a Helvetica Neue Condensed font which I got from the Adobe Font Collection Pro Package. Unfortunately, it seems to draw incorrectly when I use it within a UILabel.

The line height seems to be calculated correctly (I think), but when the font is displayed, it is aligned to the very top of the bounding box. I called [myLabel sizeToFit] and only adjusted the width to produce this screen capture:

I had the same problem with both the bold and regular version of the font. I was able to pull a version of Helvetica Neue Bold from OSX and put it on my device and it displays fine (green background in above picture).

What could be wrong with the either the font file or my code that would cause it to draw this way?

Answer 1

I posted a solution that involves patching ttf font file here:

Here's the solution that worked for my custom font which had the same issue in UILabel, UIButton and such. The problem with the font turned out to be the fact that its ascender property was too small compared to the value of system fonts. Ascender is a vertical whitespace above font's characters. To fix your font you will have to download Apple Font Tool Suite command line utilities. Then take your font and do the following:

~$ ftxdumperfuser -t hhea -A d Bold.ttf

This will create Bold.hhea.xml. Open it with a text editor and increase the value of ascender attribute. You will have to experiment a little to find out the exact value that works best for you. In my case I changed it from 750 to 1200. Then run the utility again with the following command line to merge your changes back into the ttf file:

~$ ftxdumperfuser -t hhea -A f Bold.ttf

Then just use the resulting ttf font in your app.