Italic Font not work for Chinese/Japanese/Korean on iOS 7

Question

I want to set Italic Font Style in UITextView, but Italic Font just not work for Chinese/Japanese/Korean on iOS 7.Could anyone help?

Stator

Why do you need this? Italics are generally not used in Asian character sets. – Jaf

Because I want to display the text in the same style,not just for Chinese/Japanese/Korean. – Stator

You may need to accept that some languages do things differently and adapt accordingly. In Japanese, you can boldface a word by putting dots above each letter. Would you expect that to work in English? – Jaf

You can take a look,iOS 7 Email App and Evernote just work fine with Italic Font for Chinese/Japanese/Korean. – Stator

Answer 1

Because there are no italic styled Chinese fonts on iOS, you need to use affine transformation to slant the normal styled Chinese font.

The code below gives a 15° slant to Heiti SC Medium:

CGAffineTransform matrix = CGAffineTransformMake(1, 0, tanf(15 * (CGFloat)M_PI / 180), 1, 0, 0);
UIFontDescriptor *desc = [UIFontDescriptor fontDescriptorWithName:@"Heiti SC Medium" matrix:matrix];
textView.font = [UIFont fontWithDescriptor:desc size:17];

Real effect:

Youngs

Answer 2

I’m not solving your problem, but to remind you that this kind of “programmatic italic font” has really bad readability.

For CJK text, the right way to express emphasis (or quote) is to use another style (usually serif font). For Simplified Chinese, use Songti, Fangsong, or Kaiti instead of oblique for emphasis if your normal text is using Heiti (iOS default). I’m not very familiar with Korean and Japanese, but they use similar approaches.

Here is a font list for iOS 7: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5878?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US Japanese Mincho font “Hiragino Mincho ProN” is available directly. Extra Chinese fonts are not installed by default. You’ll need to download first. Please refer to this example for how to install additional system-provided fonts: https://github.com/fdstevex/FDSFontDownloader/ .

I know it’s a little bit complicated, but this is really how we do italic.

Christian

Answer 3

Agree with @an0 but In this way to made transform are better for read and understand

CGAffineTransform CGAffineTransformMakeSkew (CGFloat degree) {
    CGAffineTransform t = CGAffineTransformIdentity;
    t.c = (degree * M_PI / 180.0f);
    return t;
}

Fellowship