The hardware at this Apple event was pretty unremarkable, so I ended up using the software version number as the headline. The software itself didn’t exactly deliver anything thrilling either, but it did solve a problem that had been bothering me for half a year. That alone deserves some respect.
Last night I did not stay up to watch Apple’s keynote, because I wanted to achieve the rare combo of getting up early and having breakfast. In the end, breakfast was sacrificed anyway.
Ever since upgrading to iOS 9.0, I noticed a strange issue: Chinese text would turn into garbled characters. It showed up when I used the built-in PDF viewer, and it also happened in some third-party PDF apps. Text-based PDF files simply wouldn’t display properly. At first I thought it was just my device acting up, but later I found similar reports on Zhihu and realized this was something caused by the system update.
After that, whenever Apple pushed out a minor or major update, I would always check what problems had been fixed. But not a single changelog ever mentioned this garbling issue. Not this time either.
Still, I updated as soon as each new version came out. And finally, with iOS 9.3, the problem I had been living with for months was gone. I no longer had to install Foxit PDF Reader just to read papers.
What’s a little odd is that Apple didn’t mention this in the release notes at all. Maybe they never realized the problem existed in the first place, or maybe they fixed it without even meaning to.
As for the root cause, it seems to have been tied to iOS 9 introducing a new font set while removing some Chinese fonts, which led to missing glyphs.