Droid fonts

Droid
Category Sans-serif, Serif, Monospace
Designer(s) Steve Matteson
Foundry Ascender Corp.
Date released 2007
License Apache License
Sample

Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android[1] and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation. The name was derived from the Open Handset Alliance platform named Android.

Examples

Typefaces

The Droid font family consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif:

Droid Sans is available as many variations, some of which are listed below:

Other variations of the Droid Sans Fallback font could be found on other language rich websites, especially those with Hindi or Khmer language support, are listed below:

The Droid Sans Mono typeface consists of only the Regular font. The design is similar to Matteson's closed source Andalé Mono typeface design. Taking advantage of the license under which the original typefaces were released, modifications of this Droid Sans Mono have appeared on the internet. Of particular note are those modifications that replace the plain zero glyph with dotted or slashed versions. Such modifications are particularly desired by users making heavy use of monospaced typefaces, including software developers, because they provide a more prominent differentiation between the two characters. They include:

The Droid Serif typeface consists of Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic fonts. Other variations of the Droid Serif font includes:

Each typeface has an extensive character set including coverage of Western European, Eastern/Central European, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish languages.

Droid Pro (2009)

On 12 February 2009, Ascender Corporation announced the retail version of the Droid fonts under the Droid Pro family. The fonts were sold in OpenType and TrueType font format. The planned Droid Pro family consists of Droid Sans Pro (Regular, Bold), Droid Sans Pro Condensed (Regular, Bold), Droid Sans Pro Mono (Regular, Bold), Droid Serif Pro (Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic), Droid Sans Fallback. Initial releases include Droid Sans Pro, Droid Serif Pro. OpenType features include Old Style Figures. Droid Sans Pro Mono went on sale beginning in 2009-07-31.

Handset Condensed (2010): Handset Condensed is a condensed version of Droid Sans Pro designed by Ascender Corp's Steve Matteson released on the 1st of March 2013 to be compatible with the Droid family of fonts, but without OpenType features. Similar to Droid Sans Pro, the family includes 2 fonts in Bold and Regular weights without italics. It supports the WGL character set.

Droid Arabic Kufi and Droid Arabic Naskh

In 2009, Ascender Corporation designed specially customed fonts for Google Fonts API as language support for the Arabic and Persian languages. The fonts that were released are available at the Google Fonts website and are Droid Arabic Naskh [both Bold and Regular weights] and Droid Arabic Kufi [both Bold and Regular weights]. Other variations that were found until recently includes the Droid Persian Naskh, a specific font for the Persian Farsi language distributed by Open Font Library in May 2014.

In late 2014, Google has announced a slight change to their apps' logo fonts, as they were changing from Roboto Slab typeface to the newly made Droid Logo typeface [available in Bold and Regular weights]. The font is available on the Google Fonts website, for usage so long as the user does not incorporate the font into their own company's corporate logos.

Special Droid typefaces in Android phones

It has been found that in some Android smartphones that operate under the Android 4.2 Jellybean OS that the following fonts have been found in the Fonts folder in the phone's rooted 'systems' folder. The fonts include:

Other variations of the Droid font that aimed to depict the Android 'robot' image logo include [Droid Robot Regular font] and [Droid Robot Japanese Regular font - for Japanese language support]. Aims by specific language font designers to adapt fonts for particular Southern Asian languages include Droid Hindi [support for the Hindi language], Droid Telugu [support for the Telugu language] and Droid India [support for the Indian languages all over India]. These fonts could be found on Github or in the XDA Developers forum for Android smartphones.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Woyke, Elizabeth (26 September 2008). "Android's Very Own Font". Forbes. Retrieved 22 February 2012.
  2. ↑ https://code.google.com/archive/p/droid-sans-mono-py/
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