Force Lucida Grande Font in a Yosemite Cocoa app

Question

I have a requirement for some labels in my app to use Lucida Grande. When I specify this font in Xcode it renders correctly in the xib, but when you launch the app in Yosemite it switches back to Helvetica Neue.

How can I get this to work correctly?

Answer 1

As per Ken's advice, setting the font manually in the awakeFromNib() method gives the correct result.

You can either set the font property of the NSTextField

[self.myLabel setFont:[NSFont fontWithName:@"Lucida Grande" size:50.f]];

or use an NSAttributedString

NSDictionary *attributes = @{ NSFontAttributeName : [NSFont fontWithName:@"Lucida Grande" size:50] };
NSAttributedString *text = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:@"Hello" attributes:attributes];
[self.myLabel setAttributedStringValue:text];

Interestingly, in many cases I have seen fonts with spaces in the font name input with dashes, i.e. @"Lucida-Grande", this actually breaks the output, dashes must be omitted.