
Roboto: Google’s signature font is now open source - xPaw
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/05/roboto-googles-signature-font-is-now.html
======
sahaskatta
Also worth take a look at the Roboto specimen booklet which presents the font
in a better light than the Google Fonts website (PDF): [http://material-
design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/materi...](http://material-
design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/material_v_3/material_ext_publish/0B0J8hsRkk91LNGdYTEF0VnVPT0k/RobotoSpecimenBooklet.pdf)

~~~
vanderZwan
They say they keep updating it, which kind of makes me wonder what the best
way is to keep up to date with the newest versions. Is there an automated way
to do that? I don't like to manually check every other month if a font has a
new version, and cloning the repo seems overkill if all I want is the output.

~~~
sp332
Oh wow, they got rid of the Helvetica-style R entirely. Good riddance, that's
my least favorite thing about Helvetica.

~~~
thrillgore
I really appreciated they decided to blow away all the Helvetica
characteristics and go straight for an inspired variation of Akzidenz-Grotesk.
It looks great on print!

~~~
Steko
It's really come a long way since launch.

[http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-
a-f...](http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four-
headed-frankenstein/)

Kudos to Stephen Coles for keeping that article updated as the font has
evolved and improved.

~~~
duncanawoods
The K's with the flat middle were horrible. Interesting that they were the
only characters poached from Ronnia and now replaced with something more
familar.

------
yincrash
Not that many people respect font licensing, but the Roboto font has been
Apache licensed since it was released (like the rest of AOSP and fonts
previous to Roboto in Android). Moving to a full open production and tool
chain is interesting though.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It was always Apache, but having these source files makes a huge difference on
the "open source" part of "free and open source".

~~~
dragonwriter
"Free and Open Source Software" (often abbreviated F/OSS) doesn't refer to two
different features "free" and "open source", it attempts to bridge two
different communities preferred terms for licensing with essentially identical
features, OSI's "Open Source" [0] and FSF's "Free Software" [1].

Being Apache licensed already handled both the "open source" [2] and "free
software" [3] parts.

[0] [http://opensource.org/osd-annotated](http://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)

[2]
[http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0](http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0)

[3] [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.en.html#apache2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.en.html#apache2)

~~~
mikekchar
Hmm... gnu.org is down for me and I can't actually check these articles to
make sure I'm not imagining things, but I will link them anyway:

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-
freedom.en.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-
freedom.en.html)

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.e...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.en.html)

Probably you can understand simply by looking at the urls anyway ;-). To say
that F/OSS doesn't refer to 2 different features, "free" and "open source", is
to advance only one of the viewpoints from the 2 movements.

As much as it would be convenient if it were not the case, "free software" and
"open source" software do, in fact, refer to different (although similar)
things in many people's minds.

I am not the right person to explain the differences and if gnu.org were not
down I would simply point you to the arguments that the FSF have against
referring to free software as "open source". However, I will do my best to
explain. Please verify what I'm about to say when you get the opportunity.

The intent of free software is to ensure that all users and programmers can
deal with the software on a level playing field. By this I mean that one
programmer can not use legal or technical mechanisms to have more capability
than another. Everybody has the same access and ability to run the software
for whatever purpose they want. They can inspect the source code in an un-
obfuscated way. They can modify it in any way. They can distribute it, along
with their modifications, to others. Most importantly, they can not do
anything that will take away these abilities (either through legal or
technical means) from others.

The licenses in the free software movement are a means to that end. The free
software movement defines licenses that are free (in other words licenses
which do not impose restrictions that would remove the level playing field).
Some licenses, though, are free in and of themselves, but do not actually stop
people from working in a non-freedom-oriented way (I'm sure I am not the only
person frustrated that there is no antonym for "free software" \-- all
commonly used ones being deprecated by the FSF).

For example, there are many licenses which are free licenses but which allow
people to leverage the code in software that is not free. This creates an un-
level playing field because those people can build on top of the software,
extending it in a way that only they can use and then compete against the
original project without being free. In other words, if project A is free
software licensed with a permissive license, someone can make A+ which is
essentially A but with more features. They can release this under a non-free
license, competing against A and taking mind share without giving people the
freedom to modify or distribute A+.

For this reason, people in the free software movement prefer some free
licenses over others. Their entire reason for having the licenses in the first
place is to avoid the situation described above.

The open source movement is not as concerned about the issue described above.
While they advocate nearly identical methods, their goal is to encourage
licenses that allow people to interoperate smoothly if they choose to do so.

In the open source movement, it is unreasonable to prefer licences that
enforce software freedom over other OSI software licenses. In fact, many
people in the open source movement consider these kinds of licenses to be
undesirable because it stops them from using F/OSS to build products that are
not free software -- in other words, they are diametrically opposed to
software freedom and only cooperate in a similar fashion when it is
advantageous for them.

In my opinion, the term "Free and Open Source Software" is useful for
discussing the very large amount of area where the free software movement and
the open source movement overlap. It is important not to conflate the two
movements, though, because whether or not you value software freedom there are
many people who do.

In my own usage, I prefer to use the term free software when I think that the
freedom aspect of it is important. I use F/OSS when I am just talking about
interoperating with people using free software/OSI licenses. I use OSS when I
am talking about leveraging F/OSS into software that is not free.

------
randomname2
Screenshot:

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto)

~~~
sevenadrian
thank you! was just looking for a quick example and was surprised to not see
it immediately/obviously linked.

------
jsingleton
Roboto is very nice and I use it a lot. Roboto Slab [0] is also good if you
want a serif font instead.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab)

------
philippnagel
I hope this is not a dumb question, but as I have no experience/knowledge in
creating fonts, I will ask nevertheless.

I quickly scanned through the repo and assumed that the font is created
programmatically through a Python script. Is that correct and a common way to
build a new font?

~~~
mtrpcic
The actual "Font" data lives in the `src/v2` directory. For example, open up
"Roboto_Thin.ufo/glyphs" from here, and you'll see a lot of ".glyph" files.
These are essentially SVG's it appears. The python script pulls this content
together and generates appropriate font files (WOFF, TTF, etc).

~~~
jack_jennings
Technically, they are GLIF files and not SVG. The GLIF format is specced here:
[http://unifiedfontobject.org/versions/ufo3/glif.html](http://unifiedfontobject.org/versions/ufo3/glif.html)

------
sasvari
there's a LaTeX package (last version dating 2015-04-16) available [0] (with
samples [1]):

 _This package provides LaTeX, pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX support for the
Roboto, RobotoCondensed and RobotoSlab families of fonts, designed by
Christian Robertson for Google_

[0] [https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/roboto](https://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/fonts/roboto)

[1]
[http://ctan.uib.no/fonts/roboto/doc/samples.pdf](http://ctan.uib.no/fonts/roboto/doc/samples.pdf)

------
teacurran
I may be reading this wrong, but the only annoyance I would find with their
toolchain is that it seems like their true source is the FontLab files which
is not open source. The readme says that you should be able to edit the UFO
files and generate the FontLab files from that, but it doesn't seem to be the
process they are using. It would be nice for the UFO files to be the true
source rather than a derived one.

~~~
jack_jennings
Unfortunately, doing TrueType hinting more-or-less requires FontLab. There are
other alternatives that are being developed, but by and large FontLab remains
the industry tool for building TT-hints. Part of this talk by Tal Leming
([https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s](https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s))
explains some of the interchange issues with TT-hint formats. Long story
short, everyone has a slightly different hinting compiler, and they're all
proprietary.

------
temuze
Is there a font nerd here who can describe what makes Roboto unique?

~~~
anthony_romeo
I don't know specifics about this particular typeface (and I haven't been
"into fonts" for a while), but Roboto is pretty much another typeface with
some Grotesk (e.g. Helvetica) lineage. What can typically said about these
sorts of new-fangled typefaces is that they're well-optimized for reading on
screens and scale well to smaller sizes (that is to say, good for mobile). A
simple example is that the x-height (i.e. the height the lowercase 'x', and
thus roughly the height of most of the lowercase letters) is higher than a
typeface made, say, sixty years ago. The x-height in this case looks to be
about 70% - 75% the height of the capitals, which is pretty darned high.

------
sengork
Looks like the quick fox is no longer.

"Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack."

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto)

~~~
AReallyGoodName
I can't tell what type of lower case 'g' i'm getting without looking deeper :(

------
fmela
Great, now we can have a monospace version for the terminal/editor.

~~~
tracker1
I've been using Inconsolata (Consolas inspired) for a while now... but
something closer to Roboto in terms of character coverage would be really
nice.

------
alexandere
Wish the Literata font from Play books would become available.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-
boo...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-book-font-
designed-for-any-screen)

------
fit2rule
Has anyone tried to release an app into the iOS Appstore which uses this font?
It looks great in my app and I'd like to know if there are going to be
problems with Apple if I use this for an iOS/Android multi-platform app ..
anyone know?

------
Phil_Latio
Unfortunately, since a week or so it's all over YouTube. Arial was much easier
to read.

------
jamesrom
The thing most enjoyable about Roboto is how it's changes are a near perfect
reflection of Google's design capability.

------
teddyh
If it’s a “signature” font, isn’t it covered by trademark, and would this not
make any copyright licence irrelevant?

~~~
guelo
No.

~~~
teddyh
Well alright then.

------
jongibbins
Hmm... What's up with this page?

"Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition has blocked a page! Malware detected!
Access to this page has been blocked."

Any idea what's in there tripping out Bitdefender?

------
amelius
The term "open source" only means that the source code is published; it says
nothing about the license. Perhaps I'm nitpicking but the title of this post
isn't very clear in my opinion.

~~~
yohui
[http://opensource.org/osd](http://opensource.org/osd)

------
Diamons
The font is still very ugly though.

------
hypertexthero
Shameless plug: Here's a poster I made recently using Roboto Slab:

[http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/when-doubt-
move/](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/when-doubt-move/)

Edit: Is it bad etiquette here at HN to do shameless plugs for the purpose of
finding work?

~~~
grayclhn
I didn't downvote you, but this struck me as quite a bit more shameless than
most of the shameless plugs here. :)

But the downvotes might have been worth it. I'm sure some people clicked
through.

~~~
hypertexthero
Thanks, I'll try and behave myself more :)

