Droid (typeface)
Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android 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.
Examples
Typefaces
The Droid font family consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif:- The Droid Sans typeface features Regular and Bold weights. The regular weight includes support for simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Hebrew, and Thai support for the GB2312, Big 5, JIS X0208 and KSC 5601 character sets respectively which the design style for all the Ideographs are using the Simplified Chinese writing style. There is no italic variant of Droid Sans; italics would be synthesized by Android by generating an oblique form in order to save storage space. However, it is present in the fonts Open Sans and Noto Sans. Known variations include:
- Droid Sans Fallback font could be found on other language rich websites, especially those with Hindi or Khmer language support, are listed below:
- Designed by Steve Matteson and Terrance Weinzierl of Monotype Imaging, Droid Sans Mono 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 styles. Other variations of the Droid Serif font includes:
Replacement of Droid Sans with Roboto
Droid Sans was designed for the low-resolution displays of the very early Android devices and did not display well in larger, higher-resolution displays of later models. With the release of Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" in 2011, Droid Sans was replaced with Roboto as the default typeface.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 Droid Pro family consists of Droid Sans Pro, Droid Sans Pro Condensed, Droid Sans Pro Mono, Droid Serif Pro, Droid Sans Fallback. Initial releases include Droid Sans Pro, Droid Serif Pro. OpenType features include Old Style Figures, as well as dotted and plain variants of the zero glyph for Droid Sans Pro Mono. Droid Sans Pro Mono went on sale on 31 July 2009.Handset Condensed (2010)
Handset Condensed is a condensed version of Droid Sans Pro designed by Ascender Corp's Steve Matteson and released on 1 March 2013 to be compatible with the Droid family of fonts, but without OpenType features. Similar to Droid Sans Pro, the family includes two 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 and Droid Arabic Kufi . 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.Special Droid typefaces in Android phones
In some Android smartphones that uses Android 4.2 Jellybean, the following fonts have been found in the phone's "/system/fonts" folder. The fonts include:- Droid Naskh Shift Alt
- Droid Naskh Shift
- Droid Naskh System UI
- Droid Naskh UI