Ascender, leading provider of advanced font products for mobile handsets and member of the OHA, announced the “Droid Fonts”, a set of seven typefaces specially designed for the Android for optimal quality and comfort on mobile handsets. The Droid fonts family have been optimized for a better rendering 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.”

According to the press release, 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.

It’s interesting to get Asian fonts supported for Android especially Japanese, Chinese and Korean, this also reflect the Google strategy to target the largest population. But what I notice here is that Android is missing middle eastern fonts such Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to other Asian fonts. So you will be missing these for current release, but we will probably see them supported in future releases according to Ascender.

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