Using Font Suitcase fonts in iOS

Oct 29 2011

Since iOS 3.2 it’s very easy to use custom fonts in iPhone or iPad Apps. Unfortunately, this method only works with certain font formats (.otf, .ttf), and not with others such as the extension-less, Font Suitcase or PostScript Type 1 outline. But if the font you need happens to be in some other format, there’s some extra work to do.

First, extract the actual font from the resources fork of the file. Fondu can help with that. You can install fondu using homebrew (brew install fondu) or following this easy steps to install from source.

Once fondu is installed we need to extract the font resources:

> fondu path/to/fontfile/..namedfork/rsrc
# or
> fondu path/to/fontfile/..namedfork
# or
> fondu path/to/fontfile

Some people have found that they have to remove the /..namedfork/rsrc or the /rsrc part for it to work, It may depend on the way the font is packaged.

If the extracted font is a .ttf or .otf file, then you are done! In some cases it will be a .pfb or .bdf file, which will have to be converted. There’s a lot of resources for that, I used freefontconverter.com and worked perfectly.

More info on Fonts in Mac OS X

Possible resource for .dfont files (I haven’t tried it): DfontSplitter