The other day when I found a post about the Droid font family that comes with Google's Android deal, I downloaded the fonts (sadly no longer at that site) and set about putting them on my PC and tablet. In the process I ended up digging into the guts of the font rendering system on the tablet and thought I'd share my findings here.

Maemo uses the standard Linux fontconfig system, and therefore you can tweak settings using a .fonts.conf file in your home directory. I'm not sure if these settings are an improvement with the regular font or not, but I found no hinting and no subpixel rendering to be an improvement over whatever the default settings are (I'm not sure, but I know there's a difference between my settings and the defaults) using the Droid fonts. In particular, Droid Serif at 14 in FBReader seems much better with my settings; some of the characters look funny with the defaults, especially the g.

I attached my settings file; to use it just get it onto your tablet, and in the terminal copy it to "/home/user/.fonts.conf". I kept it as a .txt file so you can easily edit it with the Notes program if you want to make any changes and generally play around with it, and I kept the hinting options both in there even though one contradicts the other, also for easy tweaking. I hope someone finds it useful.

General Sample | FBReader

Personally, I use the Bitstream Vera font family on my tablet. Especially in FBReader the results are stunning, without tweaking.

At first sight, I thought Android had shamelessly copied the Vera family, but the "g" in Vera Serif is different. Still, those Droids look earily familiar...

Typography is a very subtle field where the shape of individual glyphs is only the beginning.

The spacing between different pairs of glyphs, how the shapes change when particular pairs appear together, and other factors can do a lot to affect readability of fonts in ways that aren't apparent by comparing individual glyphs.