Why does Wingdings not function on iOS 5? Why can't I use Wingdings in my iPhone app?

Question

I built a test app. All it does is populate a label on the screen with text and then try and change the font. 90% of the time this works just fine, even when I am using custom fonts that I have imported. However, I have not been able to get Wingdings to function even though I installed it in my resources folder and added it to the info.plist

self.theLabel.font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Wingdings-Regular" size:64.0f];

I thought maybe it was the name I was using, but I ran a test and found that not only is the family Wingdings installed, but Wingdings-Regular is the proper name. I ran experiments where I switched out "Wingdings-Regular" with other variations and noticed that when I do enter something that is garbage, the size is ignored. Using "Wingdings-Regular" the size is not ignored, but the letters show up normally instead of the Symbols I need. How do I fix this problem?

I am pulling my hair out.

Answer 1

Unicode is required to access the symbols in Wingdings or other symbol fonts. See How to use Wingdings font in Java Swing for more discussion. UIKit and Java are both fundamentally based on Unicode. See http://unicode.org for more details.