Roboto: Google’s signature font is now open source

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/05/roboto-googles-signature-font-is-now.html

by xPaw • 11 years ago

362 64 11 years ago

google-opensource.blogspot.com

randomname2• 11 years ago

Screenshot:

https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto

sevenadrian• 11 years ago

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

ino• 11 years ago

That's the old Roboto, right?

So they'll just update it at some point and everyone who uses the old will automatically be using the new one?

yincrash• 11 years ago

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.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Truly and the toolchain used in creating it is the bigger headline

ocdtrekkie• 11 years ago

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

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

"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

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

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

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

Diamons• 11 years ago

The font is still very ugly though.

sahaskatta• 11 years ago

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...

sitkack• 11 years ago

Neither the announcement or the git repo even have an example of what the font looks like. It is like announcing a new copy of the Mona Lisa not having a picture of it.

jeffmcjunkin• 11 years ago

Agreed, that was bothersome.

Here's the font: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto

psychometry• 11 years ago

Nor did they have a link to simply download the font files. You can do that here: https://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Roboto

vanderZwan2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

tjohns• 11 years ago

You can use Monotype Skyfonts, which has a free service for downloading and syncing the Google Fonts collection:

http://www.fonts.com/web-fonts/google

mkingston• 11 years ago

You say in another comment that you use Ubuntu. With Arch I'd make my own package to manage this, if one didn't exist. It's quite easy with Arch, but I'm not really sure whether that's the case with Ubuntu. I've definitely found packaging to be a skill worth having.

kstenerud• 11 years ago

Is the lighter or the darker blue outline the new one? I'm still at a loss to say which one looks better or why.

zerocrates• 11 years ago

The darker blue outline (with the straight leg on the "R") is the newer one.

aembleton• 11 years ago

Dark blue is the new one.

lucio• 11 years ago

The second page spelling OCD... it is a freudian slip or it is an innocent confession?

bobbles• 11 years ago

If anyone here is from the google fonts website, theres a typo in this document:

"Bold 8.5/12pt Roboto supports 16 weights as well as advanced typographic features such as smallc aps"

Phil_Latio• 11 years ago

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

teddyh2• 11 years ago

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

guelo• 11 years ago

No.

teddyh2• 11 years ago

Well alright then.

philippnagel• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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_jennings2• 11 years ago

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

seanmcdirmid• 11 years ago

Would love to find build/hacking instructions somewhere. I'm interested in modifying a font and adding ligatures for use my in my programming editor (as is done in https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/). The best I could find is https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/62.

amelius• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

http://opensource.org/osd

temuze• 11 years ago

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

anthony_romeo• 11 years ago

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.

jsingleton• 11 years ago

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

hypertexthero5• 11 years ago

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

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?

hypertexthero5• 11 years ago

[Be kind, damnit](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/be-kind-damnit/)! :)

nkuttler• 11 years ago

Not necessarily, but see also the second last paragraph on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hypertexthero5• 11 years ago

Got it — thanks!

grayclhn• 11 years ago

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.

hypertexthero5• 11 years ago

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

corobo• 11 years ago

I think it'd go down better if there was more there. This is a more tech focused site than an arty site. If you'd drilled down the ins and outs of the tech behind the font (How to compile it from the source maybe?) it would probably have been better received

Also I read your poster as "When in doubt m,ove"

hypertexthero5• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I'm working on an article on using the font and will try compiling it from source and include the information.

Regarding the poster, the placement of the comma is intentional to suggest both an 'l' and the 'm' jumping over it, although maybe you're right and it is too much.

sasvari• 11 years ago

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

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

teacurran• 11 years ago

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_jennings2• 11 years ago

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) 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.

jongibbins• 11 years ago

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?

jamesrom• 11 years ago

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

fmela• 11 years ago

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

tracker1• 11 years ago

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.

sengork• 11 years ago

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

AReallyGoodName• 11 years ago

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

fit2rule• 11 years ago

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?

alexandere• 11 years ago

Wish the Literata font from Play books would become available.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-boo...

Roboto: Google’s signature font is now open source

Related Stories