Mobile App Fonts

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Thierry Blancpain
Thierry Blancpain Posts: 217
in Type Design Technique & Theory
What are the correct formats to deliver mobile app fonts to app developers? We’re slowly working on allowing for that, but I can’t seem to find good background information on which platform prefers which font format.

FontFont offers TTF, the new SwissTypefaces site offers OTF files (they could be TTF OTFs though) for mobile app development. If we want to support iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile, what formats should we deliver our fonts in? Hinted? Unhinted?

Any knowledge or links in this direction would be appreciated.

Comments

  • SiDaniels
    SiDaniels Posts: 277
    TTF unhinted, or lightly hinted.
  • Marcos Ojeda
    Marcos Ojeda Posts: 31
    as early as ios 3.2 on the ipad and 4.0 on the phone/ipod, ios happily gobbled up ttf or cff flavored otfs. my rough memory from prototyping back then was that, as on osx, ios also ignored truetype hints.
  • PabloImpallari
    PabloImpallari Posts: 824
    edited November 2013
    Some of our fonts (Lobster and Dosis in particular) has been extensively used in hundreds of iPhone and Android apps. They seem to work well as they are out of the box, with no special preparation, as no one has ever complained about technical problems yet.
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 680
    iOS has never used any hints from either OpenType or TrueType fonts just the same as MacOSX. The rendering should be quite similar to how fonts look in Safari.
  • Rodrigo Saiani
    Rodrigo Saiani Posts: 78
    Any consideration for file size?

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