

Roboto: Android font explained By Glenn Fleishman - radley
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/roboto.html

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naner
I am bewildered by the amount of character typography experts seem to be able
to discern from (what to me are) these plain little serif-less monotone Latin
characters that litter our screens. I do notice when things are very wrong,
but I'm sort of puzzled by the amount of design and individuality that is
expected to be incorporated in such a small space. How much variance is
possible under these types of constraints?

~~~
mithaler
Intuitively, I think similarly--and then I put two pieces of the same text
next to each other, one in Helvetica and one in Roboto, and I immediately
sense a subtle difference in personality that I can't put my finger on but I
know is there.

~~~
cpeterso
Roboto has slightly looser strokes and shorter tails than Helvetica, but their
letter shapes are _very_ close. Here is a diagram showing Roboto overlaying
Helvetica:

[http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-
helv...](http://theunderstatement.com/post/11645166791/roboto-vs-helvetica)

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shuzchen
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned anything about CJK glyphs. I still use
Droid Sans as my terminal font, both because I like to program in it and that
it had really good CJK support. I haven't read anything mentioned about that
with Roboto - I hope they didn't end up ignoring that.

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danko
I appreciate the thoroughness of the analysis, even as my eyeballs started to
swim amidst the typographical lingo. The article doesn't so much 'explain' the
font, though, as explain the constraints under which the font was designed.

Even in understanding the constraints, I can't help but feel that Roboto is a
font that's outsmarted itself. All of this hyper-sensitivity to the finer
points of smartphone typography is great, but I think it may be achieving
effects so subtle as to just _not be there_ for most of the audience. In the
meantime, it punts on actually providing a detectable personality (at least
IMO). Helvetica _has_ a personality, and eighty years of baggage and
connotation that goes with it. A frankenfont is never going to have that.

~~~
justincormack
The subtle thing you shouldn't notice is readability (at multiple
resolutions), I think it works well. Android can't use Helvetica anyway for
licensing reasons, so they need an open source font; Roboto is Apache
licensed.

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foobarbazetc
This article, like Roboto, is barely readable. :)

I was wondering why I had so much trouble reading this screen full of text,
and it turned out the entire thing is typeset in Roboto. Argh.

Roboto is not (that) interesting. People need to stop going on about it.

~~~
AllenKids
In Roboto's defense (If there ever was one) it really is not fitted to be
displayed on desktop OSes. Of course that kinda goes against Fleishman's
argument that it is designed to be versatile across dpi configurations.

~~~
pak
The article mentions "low 100s of ppi to 300 ppi," which is about the range
for smartphone screens these days. Most desktops and notebooks still have
displays at around 96 dpi.

~~~
AllenKids
On a 17" 1920x1200 display Roboto still looks like crap.

It has no desktop anti-alias feature. To me it never looks good, but on
desktop especially crappy.

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Hontano
A few paragraphs in to the article I was wondering what font the article was
written in. I figured it might be Roboto and sure enough, a quick trip to Web
Inspector shows it is.

I'm not a fan of Roboto personally as each character feels too narrow,
squashed, and makes for tiring reading. I frequently check what fonts are in
use when it's something unusual. The most beautiful by far that keeps cropping
up is Proxima Nova.

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AllenKids
All these rationalization still can't change Roboto as a whole is not well put
together and has severe identity crisis. When your team look disjointed and at
odds with each other, really there is no win in technicalities.

Besides, fonts are art with utilities, you can try to repaint Starry night
again and again (each time more modern and technically advanced), Van Gogh is
not perfect should not be the reason. I find Glenn Fleishman faulting Apple
for not having an episode of Not Invented Here Syndrome rather baffling.

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atesti
Where can I download these fonts?

~~~
sp332
Regular: [http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-
Regular-...](http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-Regular-
webfont.ttf)

Italic: [http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-
Italic-w...](http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-Italic-
webfont.ttf)

Bold: [http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-Bold-
web...](http://boingboing.net/features/roboto/roboto/Roboto-Bold-webfont.ttf)

