Calling setBold, setItalic, etc. on a font cause iOS to revert to the default system font

MacOSX and iOS
1

A snippet of code speaks more than a thousand words…


// Get a Label
auto *lbl = new Label("myLabel", "This text will be displayed with a beatiful font");
addAndMakeVisible(lbl);

// Choose a font name
String FontFace = "myBeautifulFont.ttf";

Font lblFont;

int ff_size(0);
auto ff_data = BinaryData::getNamedResource(FontFace.replace(".", "_").replace("-", "").toRawUTF8(), ff_size);
if (ff_size > 0) 
	lblFont = Font(Typeface::createSystemTypefaceFor(ff_data, ff_size));

// Set font height... this will however look bigger on iOS! (but that's a different matter)
lblFont.setHeight(juce::jmax<float>(8.f, (float)Parameter_Height - 4.f));

// Set some style options...
String Style = "Bold Italic";

// Don't set if not necessary! Setting these will revert to the default system font on iOS (Juce bug?!)
lblFont.setBold(Style.containsIgnoreCase("Bold"));
lblFont.setItalic(Style.containsIgnoreCase("Italic"));

lbl->setFont(lblFont);

And yes… on a side note, all fonts look bigger on iOS.

2

As far as I know, a ttf file only contains a single font. Different variants of the font (bold, italic etc.) are contained in separate ttf files (or they can all be wrapped into a collection, “.ttc”).

The system is probably failing to find a font with the style that you request, and falling back to the default style.

Note that the FontsDemo from the JUCE repo does support bold/italic correctly on iOS, so it’s definitely possible to get different font styles to work.

3

The system is actually falling back to the default font, not only to the default style.
I have tried with many fonts and I can indeed obtain bolds, italics and other styles as long as these can be found. But once I have loaded a TTF, if only I call font.setBold(false) the font reverts to the default system font.