I'm an iOS developer, and I've been testing our app in iOS 18.0 Beta. I noticed that there's a problem with the font rendering, and after troubleshooting, I've found out that it's caused by the removal of the PingFang.ttc font in 18.0. I would like to ask the reason for removing this font file and which font should be used to display Chinese in the future?
My test device is an iPhone 11 Pro and the system version is iOS 18.0 (22A5297). I have also tested Beta 1 and it has the same issue.
In previous versions of the system, the PingFang font is located in this directory /System/Library/Fonts/LanguageSupport/PingFang.ttc
. But in iOS 18.0, the font file in this directory has become Kohinoor.ttc, and I've tested that this font can't display Chinese either.
I traversed the following system font directories and could not find the PingFang.ttc font file.
/System/Library/Fonts/AppFonts
/System/Library/Fonts/Core
/System/Library/Fonts/CoreAddition
/System/Library/Fonts/CoreUI
/System/Library/Fonts/LanguageSupport
/System/Library/Fonts/UnicodeSupport
/System/Library/Fonts/Watch
Looking for answers, thanks for the help!
The more significant issue here is that on macOS 15/iOS 18, the shipped version of PingFang is no longer a standards-compliant TTC file, but instead uses a nonstandard "hvgl" table to store glyph data (FB15161959). This means that despite CoreText being used to look up a font for Chinese text, the resulting font file cannot be parsed by cross-platform libraries. This has also been reported to Freetype, but they're unable to make progress without documentation on the new format: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/1281