1154402 - Use system font instead of hardcoded Helvetica Neue

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for iOS :: General, defect)

Description

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

We have a lot of places where we hardcode Helvetica Neue and for example do things like:

  cell.textLabel?.font = UIFont(name: UIAccessibilityIsBoldTextEnabled()
      ? "HelveticaNeue-Medium" : "HelveticaNeue", size: 17)

I found out that when we replace this with:

  cell.textLabel?.font = UIFont.systemFontOfSize(17, weight: UIFontWeightMedium)

iOS will automatically do the right thing when accessibility 'bold fonts' is enabled.

So I am going to suggest to change the hardcoded occurences of Helvetica Neue to UIFont.systemFont(_ size:, weight:)

Comment 1

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Sorry so the above example would actually be:

  cell.textLabel?.font = UIFont.systemFontOfSize(17, weight: UIFontWeightNormal)

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I ran into UIFont.preferredFontForTextStyle today. That would also allow our font sizes to adjust to the system setting for size (not just bold). Do we want that?

Comment 3

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

We should be good citizens and respect the user choices from Settings/General/Accessibility. With an adaptive layout this should indeed not be a problem at all. So I'd vote for "yes, we want that!"

Comment 4

[Boris Dušek]

I agree with Marco. In general, it would be best for consistency on many levels (including accessibility) to use Dynamic Type (i.e. UIFont.preferredFontForTextStyle) where possible and where the designers allow that / OK that :-)

Comment 5

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Attachment: PR: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/553

This patch replaces calls to `UIFont(name:size:)` with `UIFont.systemFontWithSize(,weight:)`. This also replaces the usage of `UIAccessibilityIsBoldTextEnabled()` because systemFontWithName() will automatically return a bolder font when the user has enabled that feature.

Comment 6

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

The UIFont.preferredFontForTextStyle() call looks interesting. If we can use this then lets do this in a followup bug. I see it uses text styles like 'Heading', 'Body' and 'Footnote'. I am not entirely sure how that would map to our designs. Maybe that is more for structured content?

Comment 7

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Comment on attachment 8614837 [details] [review]
PR: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/553

LGTM!

Comment 8

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Ya I've heard good things about UIFont.preferredFontForTextStyle but also have heard that the number of sizes you can choose from is limited to the following choices:

let UIFontTextStyleHeadline: String
let UIFontTextStyleSubheadline: String
let UIFontTextStyleBody: String
let UIFontTextStyleFootnote: String
let UIFontTextStyleCaption1: String
let UIFontTextStyleCaption2: String 

The other thing to watch out for is the font sizes can change depending on the user's text size preferences which can cause layouts to break if we made any assumptions about the size of any labels.