How to get monospaced numbers in UILabel on iOS 9

At WWDC 2015, there was a session about the new “San Francisco” system font in iOS 9. It uses proportional number rendering instead of monospaced numbers by default when linked against the iOS 9 SDK. There is a convenient initializer on NSFont called NSFont.monospacedDigitsSystemFontOfSize(mySize weight:) that can be used to explicitly enable monospaced number display.

However I couldn't find the UIKit equivalent for this on UIFont.

Solution

Handy UIFont extension:

extension UIFont {
    var monospacedDigitFont: UIFont {
        let newFontDescriptor = fontDescriptor.monospacedDigitFontDescriptor
        return UIFont(descriptor: newFontDescriptor, size: 0)
    }
}

private extension UIFontDescriptor {
    var monospacedDigitFontDescriptor: UIFontDescriptor {
        let fontDescriptorFeatureSettings = [[UIFontDescriptor.FeatureKey.featureIdentifier: kNumberSpacingType,
                                              UIFontDescriptor.FeatureKey.typeIdentifier: kMonospacedNumbersSelector]]
        let fontDescriptorAttributes = [UIFontDescriptor.AttributeName.featureSettings: fontDescriptorFeatureSettings]
        let fontDescriptor = self.addingAttributes(fontDescriptorAttributes)
        return fontDescriptor
    }
}

Usage with @IBOutlet properties:

@IBOutlet private var timeLabel: UILabel? {
    didSet {
        timeLabel.font = timeLabel.font.monospacedDigitFont
    }
}

Latest version on GitHub.