CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosobjective-cunicode
Meshach
Meshach

Reputation: 315

iOS Font Not Properly Displaying All Unicode Characters

Example of two characters: U+22FF, U+23BA... and many others.

Is this an encoding layer that I'm misunderstanding for iOS? Like, at some point it no longer can properly display codes beyond 22B...?

I'm capturing this in an NSString, and trying to simply update a text field. Something like

NSString *test = @"\u23ba";
[displayText setText:test];

This will display a standard type error like a box with a question mark in it, or just a box (depending on the font).

Is there a way to expand the unicode options for iOS? Because these can be displayed on my Mac. Or, is my only option some variant of the NSAttributableString route?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2486

Answers (1)

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201866

U+22FF and U+23BA are valid codepoints (assigned to characters). But they are supported by a few fonts only. So you should first check which font(s) are being used, or available.

For example, U+22FF is included in Asana-Math, Cambria, Cambria Math, Code2000, DejaVu Sans (oddly, only Bold Oblique typefaces), FreeSerif, GNU Unifont, Quivira, Segoe UI Symbol, STIXMath, STX, Sun-ExtA, Symbola, XITS, XITSMath. U+23BA is included in Cambria, Cambria Math, Code2000, FreeMono, FreeSerif, GNU Unifont, Quivira, Segoe UI Symbol, Sun-ExtA, Symbola. Many of these are free fonts. Typographic quality varies a lot. Cambria fonts and Segoe UI Symbol are commercial, shipped with some Microsoft products. There are probably some other fonts that cover those characters, but not many (Everson Mono, I suppose, I don’t currently have it).

Upvotes: 2

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