Wednesday, 14 November 2007

New Fonts Created for Android Platform

A new set of customized fonts have been designed and engineered for use in the system User Interface (UI) font for the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. The creator, Ascender who is a provider of font products and innovative applications for mobiles, said it worked with the Android team to develop the system fonts for the Android platform....

A new set of customized fonts have been designed and engineered for use in the system User Interface (UI) font for the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance.

The creator, Ascender who is a provider of font products and innovative applications for mobiles, said it worked with the Android team to develop the system fonts for the Android platform.

The new Droid font collection apparently provides an extensive set of styles and language support and provides optimal quality and comfort on a mobile handset when rendered in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text.

"Ascender is proud to be providing the font solution to the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. We believe that handset manufacturers, wireless carriers and application developers will be very happy with the fonts provided and we look forward to addressing the future font needs across the platform," said Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender Corporation.

"We are also very excited that the platform supports our Ascender Compact Asian Font solution (ACAF) which will make it easy for manufacturers to implement additional high quality Asian fonts in a small footprint."

This development comes just a week since Android—the open platform for mobile devices backed up by the likes of Google, Samsung and Motorola-- was announced. Android seeks to foster innovation on mobile devices and give consumers a far better user experience than what is available on today's mobile platforms.

The Droid family of fonts consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif. Each contains extensive character set coverage including Western Europe, Eastern/Central Europe, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish support. The Droid Sans regular font also includes support for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean support for the GB2312, Big 5, JIS 0208 and KSC 5601 character sets respectively.

As the Open Handset Alliance font technology partner Ascender can offer manufacturers, carriers and developers a variety of type design, font software engineering and font technology solutions. Ascender can modify and customize the Droid fonts, add additional language support, or create custom fonts and provide additional typefaces to complement the Android platform fonts.

Handset manufacturers and carriers requiring CJK fonts with a reduced memory footprint have the option of licensing the Ascender Compact Asian Fonts (ACAF) solution which has been enabled on the Android platform. ACAF is a proprietary, scalable font system which significantly reduces the file size of Asian fonts while still providing excellent screen legibility and performance.