Which iPhone system fonts can I use safely and which are recommended for what kind of display purpose?

Question

Fonts are like a coin lost in the forrest: You're never sure where to look first. Had to say that ;-)

Ok, so the problem: I come from the web dev world and my mind is screwed up completely regarding fonts. There is a UIFont class that can be used to specify how text in a label should look like. Unfortunately it seems I have to know a lot of font secrets to use it properly. Does anyone know which kind of fonts I can specify and which are "safe to use"?

With safe to use I mean: Which ones are not dependent a lot on the language of the user, i.e. completely inavailable if the user has Chinese language active. Nor sure if that would be a different font, all those funny symbols and stuff. I want to use the font in a "tight graphical environment" where I have a design that's made to match that font. That would look like crap if in japan the font is italic style and in greece they see huge chunky and bold letters.

So which fonts would be best to use to avoid most of uglyness-problems arount internationalization and different devices?

Answer 1

Here are a list of available fonts for the iPhone OS.

Also, you can use the UIFont APIs systemFontOfSize:, boldSystemFontOfSize: and italicSystemFontOfSize: - any of which I would imagine will handle localization reasonably.

More UIFont documentation can be found here.