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I want to create an app that uses the user's custom font, therefore I want to my app to load the ttf file at run time. I am familiar with adding custom font via the UIAppFonts key as discussed in Adding custom font on iphone. Presumably I wouldn't be successful creating a placeholder custom font that could be swapped out by my app, if provided a user-created custom version?

Community
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user216661
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    You cannot change the application bundle at runtime: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4764591/replacing-images-in-the-bundle-at-run-time. You can trying saving to the documents directory, but I am not sure if UIFont will recognize a font not found in info.plist and the application bundle. – James Paolantonio Aug 01 '12 at 17:02
  • My thought was to put a "placeholder" font in the bundle and then point the app to the "real" font in the documents directory. But I don't see any mechanism to direct the program to look for a font in the documents directory. – user216661 Aug 06 '12 at 22:43
  • Unfortunately, this doesn't sound like it is possible. – James Paolantonio Aug 07 '12 at 13:34

1 Answers1

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The font file I used was this: http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts/a/Almagro%20Regular.ttf

And I did it using this code:

 CGDataProviderRef fontDataProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithFilename([fontFilepath UTF8String]);

 // Create the font with the data provider, then release the data provider.
CGFontRef customFont =  CGFontCreateWithDataProvider(fontDataProvider);
CGDataProviderRelease(fontDataProvider);

CFErrorRef error = nil;
CTFontManagerRegisterGraphicsFont(customFont, &error);

CGFontRelease(customFont);

if (error != nil)
{
    NSError* err = (__bridge NSError*)error;
    NSLog(@"error code %d desc: %@",err.code, [err description]);
}

UIFont* f = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Almagro" size:14.0];

There are some gotcha's though. You need to know the font name since it might differ slightly from the file name. In my example, the file name was "Almagro Regular.ttf" but the font name was just "Almagro". On another forum someone said that you need to be careful about fonts with spaces in their names because a font like "Sans Serif" would be registered as "SansSerif" for UIFont fontWithName:size:

Let me know if it works.

WalterF
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