
Daring Fireball: Robotica - mmastrac
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/18/robotica
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inportb
I find Droid Sans pretty attractive, myself. Why is Roboto "definitely"
better?

Compare to <http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Droid+Sans>

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jgruber
Droid Sans was, by Google's own admission, designed for low-resolution
screens. It's like Chicago on the classic Mac OS. Looks good on low-res
screens but looks cheap on high-res ones.

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thristian
It's interesting that you mention Chicago; my first impression of Roboto on a
96dpi desktop display is that it looks an awful lot like Geneva (or at least,
the TrueType version of Geneva, as interpreted by a modern anti-aliasing font-
rasteriser).

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thristian
Are the new system fonts part of the Ice Cream Sandwich SDK? Where might
someone acquire a copy for, uh, rigorous comparison purposes?

I've never owned an Android phone, but the Droid family is gorgeous as a UI
font on Ubuntu, and the more high-quality fonts available for Linux the
better.

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inportb
<http://bandbinnovations.com/xda/Roboto-Fonts.zip> (link from post)

<http://dl.inportb.com/android/Roboto-Fonts.zip> (mirrored)

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thristian
Aha, I didn't realise the title of Gruber's post was itself a link to a
different blog-post on another site. Thanks for the link!

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tvon
Gruber's full posts have a star in the title, anything else is a reference to
another page on the web, in which case the title is a link to it.

A 'read more' link would help, I'm used to the way Gruber does it but when
other sites do the same things I don't immediately pick up on it (e.g., The
Loop does that, I think).

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degusta
Here's an animation/toggle I did comparing Roboto & Helvetica:
<http://und.st/pqCj4I>.

In the lowercase, there are only 5 letters (a, e, f, g, k) that a normal
person would have much chance of distinguishing, even some of those are
subtle. The other 21 letters appear virtually identical.

~~~
AllenKids
<http://i.imgur.com/wa7F7.png>

I stumbled on upper case "I"s and some others, but generally, it's not really
hard to see the slight ugliness.

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degusta
Haha well said (& well done).

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socratic
Has anyone compared Roboto to other Helvetica-like fonts?

In other words, it would be interesting to see the differences between
Akzidenz-Grotesk, Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Roboto, Univers, and Vera.
Something like:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Helvarial.svg>

My guess is that other than typographers, people mostly cannot tell any of the
Helvetica-ish fonts apart, and there are much bigger differences between
weights and such.

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jkmcf
I've looked at H, H-Nueue, and Roboto at large sizes in FontBook, and frankly,
I can't see an important difference. Sure, I can see the differences when I
look for them, but they are pretty minor.

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redthrowaway
I think I actually like Roboto better than Helvetica for text body. It seems
to have a better balance and weight. Check it out:

<s>[https://minus.com/lpHlCR6Rr1HRA</s>](https://minus.com/lpHlCR6Rr1HRA</s>);
(well I feel dumb) <https://minus.com/lYhmsD1xeT9ap>

I'm sure this could easily be an artifact of antialiasing and the relatively
low resolution on my mbp, but it's noticeable to me.

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thought_alarm
Both paragraphs are Helvetica in that screenshot.

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nickheer
The bottom one is definitely Roboto. Note the "e", the longer stroke at the
top of the "f", and the decidedly squarer "D".

~~~
redthrowaway
I uploaded the corrected version.

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karl_nerd
One thing that is completely missed by the "letter-by-letter" comparison is
that Roboto by default has much looser kerning ("letter-spacing") than
Helvetica. This should make some difference when screen reading. IIRC iOS,
even version 5, doesn't support kerning in UIKit. Does anyone know if Android
does?

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AllenKids
aka less stoic looking Helvetica with ugly "K"s

