[Android Themes] ei8htohms:
Android Logo (inspired) font (updated 6-13-09)

Hello All,

I've gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and enjoyment from reading these forums, so it gives me great pleasure to be able to "give something back" to the community and I hope some folks can use and enjoy it.

I became a little obsessed with getting my hands on the Android logo font (the one on the animated splash screen) and, although it looked briefly like some version of it was going to be available when Lukster on Android Community posted something about it some time back, nothing ever came of it that I was able to find, so I finally decided to make my own.

I used the .png pics from that thread as a general guideline for how the capital letters should look and then just took some creative liberties with the lower case letters and numbers. I tried it first using Fontstruct (a very fun online way to make fonts if you've never made one before) but the results were not so hot, so I finally taught myself just enough FontForge to get some results I can live with. This is my first font ever, so please be kind, but please do offer any advice or criticism you might have for how it can be improved!

I built this right on top of the original DroidSans.ttf files so that I could be sure that all the characters commonly (and uncommonly) used by the phone would be supported. Then I had to copy all the characters into a brand new font file to strip off all of the no-longer accurate copyright/trademark information from Ascender and Google and I suspect that the overall presentation of the font may have been compromised in the transfer process due my near complete ignorance of all the various instructions and constraints, etc. that are variously embedded into a proper/professional font file. I will continue to go back and try to tweak some of these properties over time and will uploaded the latest versions, but what I have now seems to be working and is reasonably attractive and tolerably legible. All of the capital and lower case letters as well as the numerals are of my own creation (although obviously heavily inspired by the ANDROID logo and the font Lukster posted previously).

Both TrueTypeFont (TTF) files are attached as a Zip file simply for the sake of uploading it to the forum, so you'll want to unzip them first. Then you can ADB or fastboot them to your phone after renaming them to DroidSans.ttf and Droidsans-Bold.ttf or you can copy them to your SD card and load them from terminal, recovery terminal or with a Gscript as discussed in the font threads available on XDA.

Although plenty of folks simply load a single font file renamed as both DroidSans and DroidSans-Bold, I noticed that doing so basically disables the bold functionality on the phone, so I prefer loading both the regular and bold versions so that text will format appropriately, especially where the contrast is intended for emphasis. Thanks to the advice of anddep and the template and signing/set-up advice from Stericson I've also uploaded an update.zip of the fonts. Just rename it to update.zip in the root of your SD and Alt-S it from recovery mode and it'll replace the font files for you.

It is not by any means the most legible font you'll ever find, so the chances of folks leaving it on their phones for any period of time seems pretty slim, but it might be useful for some wallpapers, program UI screens, splash screens, etc. Feel free to use this font for any NON-commercial uses you see fit, understanding what it is and what it is not; just mention that you got it from ei8htohms when you do so.

_john

[Edit 5-24-09: This version is much improved with regards to regularity of character height, etc.]

[Edit 6-13-09: Corrected some missing glyphs that created formatting anomalies in app drawer, etc.]

[Edit 3-12-11: Added a version with (hopefully) correctly marked regular and bold versions for use on Mac or other PCs. Let me know if it doesn't work!]

[Edit 7-29-12: Added an update.zip package with Italic and Bold Italic versions suitable for ICS and JB.]