Hi!
The following is all my own personal opinion; I currently do some font
related consulting for Google Inc (mainly Web Fonts project) so I know
a little bit about these fonts, but this is NOT an official position
of the company in any way.
On 15 July 2012 21:42, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net> wrote:
A. I used a few hundred MiBs of Android git checkout as source.
That's the canonical source for Droid, yes.
(The Roboto fonts in that repo has another canonical source,
http://developer.android.com/design/style/typography.html)
The fonts are also available in the Google font directory but it
does not permit convenient checkout (one either needs to collect
download URLs file-by-file, or perform a full-repository multi-gig
mercurial checkout)
Right, because its a repo for that project, not for the fonts used by
that project.
its relationship with android as upstream is unclear
They are separate projects and while formally have the same parent
company, they may as well be different companies with no relationship
beyond their libre license.
and it has been known to cut-down fonts to limit their weight
when used in CSS files.
Right; its a repo of web fonts.
As for other web sites, they are generally more convenient, but
their
upstream status is unclear, and they love to zap licensing terms to
“simplify” their users' lives (even in Google-sponsored sites). So I
concluded that what was good enough for Android was good enough for us.
:-)
C. I tried to dispatch the Arabic variants in the Latin family they
were
designed to complement, but I may have misunderstood the design info
available online.
Please clarify 'dispatch' :-)
D. Lots of new scripts here. i18n and l10n teams probably need to
take a
look to decide it that changes font defaults for some locales, and if
compts changes are needed.
:-)
E. If the package description does not correctly attribute the main
designers involved, please educate me and I'll correct it.
I'll see if I can find out more about this.
F. I've zapped DroidSansFallbackFull DroidSansFallbackLegacy
DroidSansArabic DroidNaskh-Regular-SystemUI that seemed redundant. If they
provide something missing in the other files, please tell me what it is
and I'll fix the packages.
The Fallback fonts have CJK glyphs and others character ranges not
found in the other fonts. The Legacy one can probably be forgotten.
The UI variants have adjusted vertical metrics to fit the Android UI's
vertical space limitations.
Cheers
Dave