Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender known as the Droid family.

Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.

There are a number of Droid fonts including Droid Sans and Droid Serif but of particular interest for developers is the Droid Sans Mono font that looks great in Visual Studio not only at my favorite 10 point… but from 7 point upwards with either ClearType or standard font smoothing although some might find the fact it smooths at all sizes a little soft (or Mac-like).

Here it is at 9 point with Rob Conery’s Vibrant Ink (WekeRoad Ink) theme:

Here it is at 11 point with my Humane theme:

And here it is 12 point in Xcode on the Mac:

The only issues are:

the lack of a bold weight or italic variant which limits the syntax highlighting options

the 0 is currently not slashed (there could be some other indistinguishable character pairs)

Being that the Droid family is Apache licensed no doubt somebody will fill that gap (okay, okay, I’ll give it a shot when I get some time;-)

Download Droid Sans Mono (TrueType TTF) (79 KB, 10/2011 source)

Try my free scalable coding font Envy Code R (shown below) with Visual Studio italic support, has a bold variant and distinguishable pairs 0O etc:

[)amien