Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Google has made its Roboto font open source

By

Roboto Font
Image used with permission by copyright holder
It was merely four years ago that Google debuted Christian Robertson’s titular Roboto family of fonts, if you can believe it. Since then, the typeface that’s come to characterize Android has made its way to Chrome OS and many of the company’s core properties, including YouTube and Play Music. Indeed, it’s a tenant of Google’s material design guidelines, which makes it all the more surprising that the company’s releasing it on the open source website Github for all the world to use.

Google’s making available anything and everything necessary to modify Roboto to your heart’s content. It’s included a “revamped font production toolchain” for creating alternate variations of the font, plus a vastly expanded library of characters — the files include Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek characters, and more than triple the number of glyphs, more than 40,000 (3,350 per font) compared to the 13,000 (1,071 per font) found in earlier revisions.

Recommended Videos

“This project involved close collaboration between various teams at Google: Material Design, Internalization Engineering, Google Fonts and Android,” wrote Google text team member Roozbeh Pournader in a blog post. “With this launch, we are making Roboto a true open source project.”

Roboto, which Google released as part of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich under the Apache license, was designed to suite the pixel-dense displays just beginning to emerge at that time. Google design guru Matias Duarte described the custom-built, sans-serif font as having “a mechanical skeleton” and being “largely geometric” but with “sweeping semi-circular curves [that] give it a cheerful demeanor.”

Another high-profile font, Apple’s San Francisco on the Apple Watch, was sculpted with similar considerations in mind. “The system font was designed specifically for legibility,” read Apple’s human interface guide. “At large sizes, the fonts slightly condensed letters are set tight to take up less horizontal space. But at small sizes, they are spaced more loosely and have bigger apertures in glyphs like ‘a’ and ‘e’ to make these easier to read at a glance. Punctuation is also proportionally larger when the font gets smaller.” Rumors suggest future versions of iOS and OS X will adopt the font as default.

Unlike Google, Apple has announced no plans to release San Francisco under an open source license.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kyle Wiggers
Kyle Wiggers
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kyle Wiggers is a writer, Web designer, and podcaster with an acute interest in all things tech. When not reviewing gadgets…
Google just announced 8 big Android updates. Here’s what’s new
A photo of many Android figurines on a white wall.

At Moblie World Congress (MWC ) 2024, Google is bringing a healthy bunch of new features to Android. In line with the AI push all across the industry, some notable AI-driven enhancements are on the table. There are also a handful of core Android features that sound practically amazing.
The first in line is Gemini. The generative AI chatbot recently got a standalone app for Android, and now it’s headed for the Google Messages app. Users can chat with Gemini directly in the messaging app and use its generative capabilities for a host of things, like drafting replies, refining a message, and more.

Another feature that was showcased a while ago is finally ready for prime time. Android Auto is gaining support for message summarization for standalone texts and group chats, and it can also suggest replies. With a single tap, users will also be able to drop a message, start a call, and share an estimated arrival time. The idea is to deploy AI for crucial tasks so that it can minimize distractions while driving.
Lookout, an accessibility-centric feature for users with vision challenges, is also getting meaningful AI love. On Android phones, Lookout will now read AI-generated captions and descriptions for media content. For now, the AI boost to Lookout and Messages is limited to the English language.

Read more
Google is launching a powerful new AI app for your Android phone
Google Gemini app on Android.

Remember Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT? Well, it is now officially called Gemini. Also, all those fancy AI features that previously went by the name Duet AI have been folded under the Gemini branding. In case you haven’t been following up all the AI development flood, the name is derived from the multi-modal large language model of the same name.

To go with the renaming efforts, Google has launched a standalone Gemini app on Android. Moreover, the Gemini experience is also being made available to iPhone users within the Google app on iOS. But wait, there’s more.

Read more
Google just redesigned one of its biggest apps, and it’s bad
Google Chat app on the Play Store.

Google Chat — Google's business-oriented messaging platform that is similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams — just got a big update for its Android and iOS apps. The update dramatically changes how you navigate the app and, uh, well, it sure is something.

Google Chat's mobile app used to be broken up into two pages: Chat (direct messages between you and other users) and Spaces (larger chat rooms for multiple people). As with most apps, you switched between these with a navigation bar at the bottom of your screen.

Read more