Google’s Roboto font spells open source project

Google has put a lot of emphasis in recent times on the design of Android, particularly around Material Design. Part of the picture is the Roboto family of fonts, and Google has just announced these will now form an open source project.

New Roboto – intro

Note that Roboto is also the default font for Chrome OS, as well as Android.

The Roboto open source project will live on github, and Google says bug reports and other contributions are welcome.

Roozbeh Pournader, of the Android Text team, writes:

The font files for the Roboto family of fonts were first released under the Apache license as part of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) in 2011. With this launch, we are making Roboto a true open source project, with a revamped font production toolchain that is completely based on open source software.

Roboto family of fonts

Another key improvement in the Roboto font family has been the vast expansion of its character coverage to include all Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters in Unicode 7.0, as well as the currency symbol for the Georgian lari, to be published in Unicode 8.0. For the expansion, the number of glyphs provided in the fonts more than tripled in number, going from around 13,000 (1071 per font) to more than 40,000 (3350 per font). An earlier version of the expanded font family is included in Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and later.