John Gruber gives a great rundown of the limited number of fonts available on the iPhone. He even includes a nifty table showing what is and isn’t available. Well played, indeed.
The only point I would add is that not only are there a limited number of fonts available on the iPhone, but the fonts that are there appear to be anemic. It appears that a number of glyphs are missing, including #8617, which corresponds to the return arrow which is typically used in footnotes1.
I made a quick little HTML page that uses Javascript to tear through glyphs 8200 through 8700, which you can use to compare between the iPhone and your computer. You’ll notice only the larger roman numerals are missing, in both uppercase and lowercase forms, which I believe suggests that the missing glyphs were chosen, rather than randomly forgotten.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this is a font issue or an iPhone Safari issue, and I really don’t know how to properly test this to determine what’s going on. It appears all the fonts are missing the same glyphs, which strikes me as odd, and leads me to believe that this is possibly an issue with Safari and not the font files themselves. But what the hell do I know? I am obviously clueless about this. Honestly, I just like poking at the pretend buttons on the screen. I’ll leave the thoughtful analysis to the adults…
- Both my site and Gruber’s use them.↩
Jim Thompson
October 17, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I just noticed the missing ? character myself. I hope Apple adds this in a future release.