10 ms·

Roboto: Google’s signature font is now open source

362 points by xPaw 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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- afsina 11y ago
  "..and then proceeded to not open source anything after 2011 or so" Really? I think they have a pretty good track on open sourcing libraries just as before. Like https://github.com/google https://github.com/google and Go, Dart, Blink etc etc..
  - deleted 11y ago
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    - Diamons 11y ago
      Open sourcing a product by definition is not smart. A product is a solution to a problem that is meant to be sold. A library is a tool that enables others to make their own product but open sourcing for example Gmail would be the dumbest thing Google could ever do.
      - deleted 11y ago
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      - bad_user 11y ago
        Open sourcing Android is arguably what made Android thrive and was amongst the smartest things that Google ever did, otherwise phone makers and careers would have continued preferring something they can have some control over, like Symbian. It's also arguably why Windows Phone is for the time being dead, with Android and iOS having a staggering 96% of the market, as nobody wants another tightly controlled platform/OS, as iOS itself fulfills that role pretty well and you can't beat Apple at its own game. I don't know which definition you're referring to, but it's contrary to basic microeconomics. Open-source often fulfills one of these roles: (1) needed substitutes to prevent a dangerous competitor from completely controlling the market (e.g. Android vs iOS), (2) complementary products that increase the desirability of something else (e.g. Google Search), or (3) decreasing the cost of development (e.g. your favorite open-source programming language). Also, the value of Gmail is not in its source-code and has nothing to do with it.
        Diamons 11y ago
        Open sourcing android was the only option they had as 1)Google support is non existent and 2)they didn't have the hardware or physical distribution at the time and 3)Apple showed the world how mobile operating systems should be done and making their OS closed would be playing a game of metoo which wouldn't let them stand out in any way. Also Google doesn't have any business motive to make profit off android because their whole business model is about selling user data. if gmails source code is not its value what is it? I'm pretty sure gmails ability to search and functionality are what make it stand out which is easily replicable by taking the source code. If the source code isn't valuable, you're saying it's the brand that's valuable because without the actual product the only thing left is the gmail brand.
        foxylad 11y ago
        Gmail's value is the service it provides, which relies just as much on the infrastructure as the source code. Back to your original statement - would you consider Linus dumb for open sourcing Linux? Open sourcing a product can be a very smart move - it gives certainty of supply, and encourages other enthusiasts to share the building of it. Back in the day, silicon chip makers would allow their competitors to make copies of their chips so that consumers would know that if either company went bust they still could procure the chips they needed to build their products. If Google kept Roboto (and other elements of Android) closed, mobile phone makers would worry that if Google turned evil they could be left with hardware with no operating system. And by open sourcing Roboto, the world's font enthusiasts get to play with it. Roboto has already evolved considerably within Google, and it's likely that this process will be accelerated with a wider set of participants. So Google wins because it gets a better font for Android, and it's phone makers are happier to use Android. Seems like a smart move to me...
- DannyBee 11y ago
  " and then proceeded to not open source anything after 2011 or so." Google has released literally 1000+ open source projects since then. These are just the ones that went through me in one way or another (IE that i have personal knowledge of). So you may want to reevaluate your premise :) You can't even argue "they didn't release anything major". You may be able to argue "they didn't release anything I personally care about" I went to go reply to the typical "name a whatever that google has released as open source since then", but the person deleted their comment after two people already named some. Here, i'll double the number: GRPC Bazel LevelDB etc There are 393 projects in the main google org on github since 2012. This doesn't count the ~55 other github orgs google owns, or the fact that at least triple that number were released on code.google.com in the same time period. If you can't find something that meets whatever criteria you want to lay out, not sure what to tell you.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - munificent 11y ago
      Dart.
    - Oletros 11y ago
      Polymer
- teraflop 11y ago
  Don't forget: - Ceres (optimization library used for Street View alignment) - Zopfli (zlib-compatible lossless compressor with better space efficiency) - Kubernetes (cluster management framework based on Borg) - Cayley (graph database) - Gumbo (HTML5 parser in C) - word2vec (NLP semantic analysis tool) - FlatBuffers (memory-efficient alternative to protobuf) all of which were released between 2012 and 2015.
- bad_user 11y ago
  AOSP is still open-source, it's what allows CyanogenMod to exist, it's what allows Replicant to exist, it's why Amazon could fork it for their Fire OS and in terms of user experience, compared with both iOS and Windows Phone, it's the mobile OS that allows for third-party app stores, or that allows alternatives for "system" functionality, like the browser or the search app being used. It's also the only mobile OS on top of which the Firefox browser runs, a browser that supports extensions, like AdBlock Plus. This font itself is part of AOSP and it's been open-source for some time, licensed under APL 2, just like most of AOSP. Chromium and Chromium OS are also open-source. We are talking about another operating system that has been a success. Not to be harsh, but Microsoft hasn't open-sourced anything of this magnitude or importance. And don't get me wrong, I like the direction of .NET, however we've been having Java / the JVM, with all the great languages built on top, like Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, Kotlin, Ceylon and with all the great projects built on top, like Hadoop, Cassandra, Lucene, Apache Spark to name a few and Android uses Java-the-ecosystem as well, so we've been fine without it. But on the other hand, here's me holding in my hand a Windows device received as a gift and I can't install apps from third-party sources, I can't use my IMAP email account, not to mention IMAP IDLE, I can't use CardDAV or CalDAV (because Microsoft insists on their own patented and expensive ActiveSync), I can't change the default search engine and I'm browsing through an app store filled with shit which is supposed to be curated. And from the looks of it, Microsoft's Edge only supports extensions installed from this same store filled with shit, it won't be open-source and it won't be cross platform. And I also remember a time when Microsoft sponsored SCO in its lawsuit for the ownership of Linux and when Scott Hanselman writes an ironic article that's somehow proof enough that Microsoft hasn't killed my pappy, he conveniently forgets that Microsoft acts like a patent troll by blackmailing Android phone makers with the FAT patent and extracting from this act of racketeering more profit than from its Windows phones. And I'm becoming more and more negative on Microsoft, even though I want to like some of the things they do, but this is the reaction I'm having lately because I fail to see how Microsoft is changing, even though everybody says so - as frankly I smell nothing more than a massive PR push and it's pissing me off. And btw - I've ranted on Google and Apple countless of times, one of these days I'll write about why I've shut down my Google Apps account, my standards are pretty consistent across the board ;-)
  - 11y ago
randomname2 11y ago
Screenshot: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto
- sevenadrian 11y ago
  thank you! was just looking for a quick example and was surprised to not see it immediately/obviously linked.
- ino 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
  Truly and the toolchain used in creating it is the bigger headline
- ocdtrekkie 11y 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 11y 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 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 11y ago
      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.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.h... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.e... 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.
Diamons 11y ago
The font is still very ugly though.
sahaskatta 11y 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/material_v_3/material_ext_publish/0B0J8hsRkk91LNGdYTEF0VnVPT0k/RobotoSpecimenBooklet.pdf http://material-design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/materi...
- sitkack 11y 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 11y ago
    Agreed, that was bothersome. Here's the font: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto
    - weavie 11y ago
      Wow, look at the stats on that font - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto#stats https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto#stats - 9,979,683,779 is a lot of views in one week.
  - psychometry 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Roboto
    - gillianseed 11y ago
      They linked to the github repo linked in the first line of the announcement, you'll find the font files (ttf) in the 'hinted' directory. https://github.com/google/roboto https://github.com/google/roboto
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Phil_Latio 11y ago
Unfortunately, since a week or so it's all over YouTube. Arial was much easier to read.
teddyh 11y ago
If it’s a “signature” font, isn’t it covered by trademark, and would this not make any copyright licence irrelevant?
- guelo 11y ago
  No.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    Well alright then.
philippnagel 11y 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 11y 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_jennings 11y ago
    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
  - seanmcdirmid 11y 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/ https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/). The best I could find is https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/62 https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/62.
amelius 11y 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 11y ago
  http://opensource.org/osd http://opensource.org/osd
temuze 11y ago
Is there a font nerd here who can describe what makes Roboto unique?
- anthony_romeo 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab
hypertexthero 11y ago
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?
- hypertexthero 11y ago
  [Be kind, damnit](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/be-kind-damnit/ http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/be-kind-damnit/)! :)
- nkuttler 11y ago
  Not necessarily, but see also the second last paragraph on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - hypertexthero 11y ago
    Got it — thanks!
- grayclhn 11y 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.
  - hypertexthero 11y ago
    Thanks, I'll try and behave myself more :)
- corobo 11y 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"
sasvari 11y 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 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 11y 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_jennings 11y 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 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 11y 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 11y ago
The thing most enjoyable about Roboto is how it's changes are a near perfect reflection of Google's design capability.
fmela 11y ago
Great, now we can have a monospace version for the terminal/editor.
- tracker1 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto
- AReallyGoodName 11y ago
  I can't tell what type of lower case 'g' i'm getting without looking deeper :(
fit2rule 11y 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 11y ago
Wish the Literata font from Play books would become available. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-book-font-designed-for-any-screen http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-boo...

362 points by xPaw 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

afsina 11y ago
"..and then proceeded to not open source anything after 2011 or so" Really? I think they have a pretty good track on open sourcing libraries just as before. Like https://github.com/google https://github.com/google and Go, Dart, Blink etc etc..
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - Diamons 11y ago
    Open sourcing a product by definition is not smart. A product is a solution to a problem that is meant to be sold. A library is a tool that enables others to make their own product but open sourcing for example Gmail would be the dumbest thing Google could ever do.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - bad_user 11y ago
      Open sourcing Android is arguably what made Android thrive and was amongst the smartest things that Google ever did, otherwise phone makers and careers would have continued preferring something they can have some control over, like Symbian. It's also arguably why Windows Phone is for the time being dead, with Android and iOS having a staggering 96% of the market, as nobody wants another tightly controlled platform/OS, as iOS itself fulfills that role pretty well and you can't beat Apple at its own game. I don't know which definition you're referring to, but it's contrary to basic microeconomics. Open-source often fulfills one of these roles: (1) needed substitutes to prevent a dangerous competitor from completely controlling the market (e.g. Android vs iOS), (2) complementary products that increase the desirability of something else (e.g. Google Search), or (3) decreasing the cost of development (e.g. your favorite open-source programming language). Also, the value of Gmail is not in its source-code and has nothing to do with it.
      - Diamons 11y ago
        Open sourcing android was the only option they had as 1)Google support is non existent and 2)they didn't have the hardware or physical distribution at the time and 3)Apple showed the world how mobile operating systems should be done and making their OS closed would be playing a game of metoo which wouldn't let them stand out in any way. Also Google doesn't have any business motive to make profit off android because their whole business model is about selling user data. if gmails source code is not its value what is it? I'm pretty sure gmails ability to search and functionality are what make it stand out which is easily replicable by taking the source code. If the source code isn't valuable, you're saying it's the brand that's valuable because without the actual product the only thing left is the gmail brand.
        foxylad 11y ago
        Gmail's value is the service it provides, which relies just as much on the infrastructure as the source code. Back to your original statement - would you consider Linus dumb for open sourcing Linux? Open sourcing a product can be a very smart move - it gives certainty of supply, and encourages other enthusiasts to share the building of it. Back in the day, silicon chip makers would allow their competitors to make copies of their chips so that consumers would know that if either company went bust they still could procure the chips they needed to build their products. If Google kept Roboto (and other elements of Android) closed, mobile phone makers would worry that if Google turned evil they could be left with hardware with no operating system. And by open sourcing Roboto, the world's font enthusiasts get to play with it. Roboto has already evolved considerably within Google, and it's likely that this process will be accelerated with a wider set of participants. So Google wins because it gets a better font for Android, and it's phone makers are happier to use Android. Seems like a smart move to me...
DannyBee 11y ago
" and then proceeded to not open source anything after 2011 or so." Google has released literally 1000+ open source projects since then. These are just the ones that went through me in one way or another (IE that i have personal knowledge of). So you may want to reevaluate your premise :) You can't even argue "they didn't release anything major". You may be able to argue "they didn't release anything I personally care about" I went to go reply to the typical "name a whatever that google has released as open source since then", but the person deleted their comment after two people already named some. Here, i'll double the number: GRPC Bazel LevelDB etc There are 393 projects in the main google org on github since 2012. This doesn't count the ~55 other github orgs google owns, or the fact that at least triple that number were released on code.google.com in the same time period. If you can't find something that meets whatever criteria you want to lay out, not sure what to tell you.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - munificent 11y ago
    Dart.
  - Oletros 11y ago
    Polymer
teraflop 11y ago
Don't forget: - Ceres (optimization library used for Street View alignment) - Zopfli (zlib-compatible lossless compressor with better space efficiency) - Kubernetes (cluster management framework based on Borg) - Cayley (graph database) - Gumbo (HTML5 parser in C) - word2vec (NLP semantic analysis tool) - FlatBuffers (memory-efficient alternative to protobuf) all of which were released between 2012 and 2015.
bad_user 11y ago
AOSP is still open-source, it's what allows CyanogenMod to exist, it's what allows Replicant to exist, it's why Amazon could fork it for their Fire OS and in terms of user experience, compared with both iOS and Windows Phone, it's the mobile OS that allows for third-party app stores, or that allows alternatives for "system" functionality, like the browser or the search app being used. It's also the only mobile OS on top of which the Firefox browser runs, a browser that supports extensions, like AdBlock Plus. This font itself is part of AOSP and it's been open-source for some time, licensed under APL 2, just like most of AOSP. Chromium and Chromium OS are also open-source. We are talking about another operating system that has been a success. Not to be harsh, but Microsoft hasn't open-sourced anything of this magnitude or importance. And don't get me wrong, I like the direction of .NET, however we've been having Java / the JVM, with all the great languages built on top, like Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, Kotlin, Ceylon and with all the great projects built on top, like Hadoop, Cassandra, Lucene, Apache Spark to name a few and Android uses Java-the-ecosystem as well, so we've been fine without it. But on the other hand, here's me holding in my hand a Windows device received as a gift and I can't install apps from third-party sources, I can't use my IMAP email account, not to mention IMAP IDLE, I can't use CardDAV or CalDAV (because Microsoft insists on their own patented and expensive ActiveSync), I can't change the default search engine and I'm browsing through an app store filled with shit which is supposed to be curated. And from the looks of it, Microsoft's Edge only supports extensions installed from this same store filled with shit, it won't be open-source and it won't be cross platform. And I also remember a time when Microsoft sponsored SCO in its lawsuit for the ownership of Linux and when Scott Hanselman writes an ironic article that's somehow proof enough that Microsoft hasn't killed my pappy, he conveniently forgets that Microsoft acts like a patent troll by blackmailing Android phone makers with the FAT patent and extracting from this act of racketeering more profit than from its Windows phones. And I'm becoming more and more negative on Microsoft, even though I want to like some of the things they do, but this is the reaction I'm having lately because I fail to see how Microsoft is changing, even though everybody says so - as frankly I smell nothing more than a massive PR push and it's pissing me off. And btw - I've ranted on Google and Apple countless of times, one of these days I'll write about why I've shut down my Google Apps account, my standards are pretty consistent across the board ;-)
- 11y ago

randomname2 11y ago

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

sevenadrian 11y ago
thank you! was just looking for a quick example and was surprised to not see it immediately/obviously linked.
ino 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
Truly and the toolchain used in creating it is the bigger headline
ocdtrekkie 11y 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 11y 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 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 11y ago
    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.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.h... http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.e... 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.

Diamons 11y ago

The font is still very ugly though.

sahaskatta 11y 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/material_v_3/material_ext_publish/0B0J8hsRkk91LNGdYTEF0VnVPT0k/RobotoSpecimenBooklet.pdf http://material-design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/materi...

sitkack 11y 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 11y ago
  Agreed, that was bothersome. Here's the font: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto
  - weavie 11y ago
    Wow, look at the stats on that font - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto#stats https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto#stats - 9,979,683,779 is a lot of views in one week.
- psychometry 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Roboto
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    They linked to the github repo linked in the first line of the announcement, you'll find the font files (ttf) in the 'hinted' directory. https://github.com/google/roboto https://github.com/google/roboto

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Phil_Latio 11y ago

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

teddyh 11y ago

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

guelo 11y ago
No.
- teddyh 11y ago
  Well alright then.

philippnagel 11y 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 11y 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_jennings 11y ago
  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
- seanmcdirmid 11y 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/ https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/). The best I could find is https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/62 https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/62.

amelius 11y 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 11y ago
http://opensource.org/osd http://opensource.org/osd

temuze 11y ago

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

anthony_romeo 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab

hypertexthero 11y ago

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?

hypertexthero 11y ago
[Be kind, damnit](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/be-kind-damnit/ http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/be-kind-damnit/)! :)
nkuttler 11y ago
Not necessarily, but see also the second last paragraph on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hypertexthero 11y ago
  Got it — thanks!
grayclhn 11y 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.
- hypertexthero 11y ago
  Thanks, I'll try and behave myself more :)
corobo 11y 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"

sasvari 11y 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 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 11y 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_jennings 11y 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 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 11y 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 11y ago

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

fmela 11y ago

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

tracker1 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto

AReallyGoodName 11y ago
I can't tell what type of lower case 'g' i'm getting without looking deeper :(

fit2rule 11y 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 11y ago

Wish the Literata font from Play books would become available. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-book-font-designed-for-any-screen http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-boo...