John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame wrote a great article on the fonts that shipped with the iPhone back in July 2007. However, with the iPhone SDK launch, the article is somewhat out of date. Based on the latest available iPhone SDK here’s the current state of play in regards to built-in iPhone fonts.

Firstly, things have improved a little since John’s July 2007 article. Courier has been added, addressing the complaint of being only supplied with Courier New. Strangely, only the bold and oblique versions seem to render as Courier. The plain version of Courier looks identical to Courier New, which is probably a bug (I’m not sure whether this just affects the emulator). Other additions include Helvetica Neue, Arial Unicode MS, Hiragino Kaku (Japanese), ST Heiti (Simplified Chinese), and Apple Gothic (Korean), along with an LCD font called DB LCD Temp Black. Unfortunately, Gill Sans and Futura are still missing.

As an iPhone developer here’s a few things to keep in mind:

• Many of the standard Mac OS X font families and some of the font faces are missing on the iPhone. You can query the list of available font families using

  [UIFont familyNames]

  and for each family you can query the available font names using

  [UIFont fontNamesForFamilyName:family]

• The fonts are named differently from their Mac OS X variants. For example, Helvetica Neue is named HelveticaNeue and Times New Roman is named TimesNewRomanPSMT.
• Some of the fonts are named inconsistently. For example, Trebuchet Bold is named TrebuchetMS-Bold, but Trebuchet Bold Italic is named Trebuchet-BoldItalic.

Here’s the complete list of fonts available on the iPhone. Each image below includes the actual font name and an example set of characters as they appear rendered on the iPhone.

Arial MT

Arial Bold MT

Arial Italic MT

Arial Bold Italic MT

Courier

Courier Bold

Courier Oblique

Courier Bold Oblique

Courier New PS MT

Courier New PS Bold MT

Courier New PS Italic MT

Courier New PS Bold Italic MT

American Typewriter

American Typewriter Bold

Helvetica

Helvetica Bold

Helvetica Oblique

Helvetica Bold Oblique

Helvetica Neue

Helvetica Neue Bold

Times New Roman PS MT

Times New Roman PS Bold MT

Times New Roman PS Italic MT

Times New Roman PS Bold Italic MT

Verdana

Verdana Bold

Verdana Italic

Verdana Bold Italic

Georgia

Georgia Bold

Georgia Italic

Georgia Bold Italic

Trebuchet MS

Trebuchet MS Bold

Trebuchet MS Italic

Trebuchet Bold Italic

Marker Felt Thin

Arial Rounded MT Bold

DB LCD Temp Black

Zapfino

Arial Unicode MS

ST Heiti K Light

ST Heiti K Medium

ST Heiti J Light

ST Heiti J Medium

ST Heiti SC Light

ST Heiti SC Medium

ST Heiti TC Medium

ST Heiti TC Light

Apple Gothic

Apple Gothic Bold

Hiragino Kaku ProN W3

Hiragino Kaku ProN W6