Rex from Ascender Corporation pointed us in comments to the new born by Ascender DroidFonts.com. The Droid family of fonts designed by Ascender’s Steve Matteson beginning in the fall of 2006, and made available for the Android platform. DroidFonts.com have been launched to provide more fonts support for Professionals working on the Android platform.

Ascender can ensure that any custom work maintains the quality and consistency of the original designs, custom work include additional styles and weights, Character set extensions, Enhanced language support, and Advanced OpenType typographic features…

In addition to the latest localization capabilities offered in the Android platform,  Ascender can help making android speak all languages of the world, and will definitely open the door to many new markets worldwide like the Middle East.

Below the press release :

Enhanced versions of the Droid fonts with are now available for software & hardware developers, and for creative professionals from Ascender Corp. The http://www.DroidFonts.com website also features information about the Droid fonts which are part of Android, a complete, open mobile phone software stack.

Elk Grove Village, IL — February 12, 2009 — Ascender Corporation, a leading provider of advanced font products and innovative applications for mobile devices, today announced the DroidFonts.com website and the availability of enhanced versions of the Droid family of fonts. Ascender worked closely with Google and the Open Handset Alliance to develop the Droid system fonts for Android, a free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. The Ascender team has continued to develop custom proprietary versions and enhanced proprietary versions of the Droid fonts for OHA members. The Droid fonts are now also available in “Pro” versions with advanced typographic features for designers and creative professionals.

Steve Matteson, Ascender’s Type Director designed the original Droid fonts. They are optimized for rendering on various screen displays including user interfaces, application menus and web browsers. There are a variety of styles and weights in the Droid font family, and each font provides an extensive range of language support.

“The Droidfonts.com website reflects our commitment to build the Droid font family into a complete and vibrant font collection. We are very proud that the Droid fonts have received such a positive reception” said Ira Mirochnick, president of Ascender Corp. “We will continue to work as closely as possible with the Android team and with fellow OHA members to further the development of these important UI fonts. Based on the outstanding feedback we’ve received from creative professionals, we are also happy to now offer OpenType featured “Pro” versions of the Droid fonts.”

Ascender is working with Open Handset Alliance members and other partners to modify and customize many of the Droid fonts. Ascender is also working on new weights, new styles, and enhanced language support (more language & script coverage). The newer Droid fonts are offered by Ascender under a commercial license.

The www.DroidFonts.com website was created by Ascender to provide a comprehensive source of information about the Droid font collection. Included on the site are downloadable type specimens and an article by Steve Matteson on the making of the Droid fonts.

The Droid Pro fonts consist of:

• Droid Sans Pro Regular and Bold
• Droid Sans Pro Condensed Regular and Bold (coming soon)
• Droid Sans Pro Mono Regular and Bold (coming soon)
• Droid Serif Pro Family: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic
• Droid Sans Fallback (a font with CJK support – Coming Soon)

Today Ascender is announcing “Pro” versions of these fonts in both OpenType and TrueType font format. These versions include Old Style Figures, which require an OpenType-saavy application such as InDesign. The Droid Pro fonts are available for purchase and instant download from either the www.DroidFonts.com website, or the www.AscenderFonts.com website.

About Ascender
Ascender Corporation is a leading provider of advanced font products and innovative applications for mobile devices. Ascender’s founders are font industry experts and have been involved in developing many of the most important and influential fonts used in computers and mobile devices. Ascender provides multilingual, custom font development and mobile phone applications for a wide range of customers including creative professionals, enterprises and hardware & software developers. Ascender also provides fonts for download to graphic designers through the www.AscenderFonts.com website and to consumers through the www.FontMarketplace.com website.

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.