Font spacing between musical characters changed in iOS 4

[slahteine]

My app uses Unicode characters to display musical information - in particular the flat (♭) and sharp (♯) characters. These worked great in iPhone OS up to version 3.x, but the kerning of these characters has changed so that they are much more widely-spaced in iOS 4. This has really messed up my app's appearance with the new OS. I've widened the UILabels to accommodate the altered spacing, but the flat and sharp characters are just too spaced-out, and it just looks bad.

How can I get around this issue? I don't want to have to write my own custom string-drawing code that handles these glyphs as a special case, but it looks like I may have to do just that, which will complicate my app somewhat.

Is there a way to get the fonts to behave like they did in iPhone OS 3? It looks like all the fonts share these (and other) Unicode characters, because selecting another font doesn't change their spacing or appearance. I've thought of doing something tricky like extracting the iPhone OS 3.x fonts and embedding one or more of them into my app, but that's a whole can of worms I don't want to open if I don't have to.

Any suggestions are welcome!