This project upgrades Roboto to become a more powerful typeface system, allowing you to do more to express and finesse your text.
This project was commissioned by Google, but is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it.
Roboto became a flagship Google brand typeface in 2011, as the Android operating system UI type. It is prominently positioned in the global design community, with Google using it on Android, in web apps, and for branded content at small sizes. It is the default face of the Material Design Specification, and available to everyone under an unrestrictive license, it has been adopted by more than 11M websites and has become the most popular family in the Google Fonts library.
In 2016 the OpenType format was updated with a revised version of Apple's “TrueType GX” run-time interpolation technology. The primary motivation for the OpenType specification authors to do this was obtaining dramatic reductions in the file-size of large font families, such as Google's Noto fonts. They want to make variable fonts meaningful.
Variable fonts create new typographic possibilities, and could improve Material Specification Typography guidance in myriad ways. Today the Material typography guidelines include adjustments for tracking and font weight that are used to improve typographic-color and texture. Variations allow those adjustments to be built-in and “just work.”
After the public announcement of the technology, the Google Fonts team commissioned Font Bureau to develop a pilot project, Amstelvar, that demonstrates a novel approach that uses a system of inter-related axes. This increases the fine typographic control available to typographers, and enables a new kind of “parametric” typography.
Learn more about this new typography at variablefonts.typenetwork.com
Fonts (UFO, TTF) are available under the SIL Open Font License v1.1
Scripts and documentation are available under the Apache 2.0
Do not edit fonts outside the 1-drawings directory, they are intermediate build artifacts generated by the build script
1-drawings contains the 'true' sources, in UFO format.
build-roboto.py then takes them and builds the variable font, outputting the instance UFOs in master_ufo and instances
Those are build into TTFs using fontmake which stores intermediate binaries in master\_ttf\_interpolatable and master\_ttf
These build intermediates are checked in to keep a full historical record, as they are used for debugging purposes.
The actual TTF you should use is in /fonts