york-font

What Is This?

A font derived from Droid Sans compiled into a single convenient .ttf file.

Specifically, York is created using the following process:

1. Obtain DroidSans.ttf.
2. Obtain DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf. This second .ttf file contains most of the non-Latin glyphs.
3. Open DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf in FontForge and change the Em size from 256 to 2048 to match the value in DroidSans.ttf.
4. Open DroidSans.ttf in FontForge, and merge the rescaled DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf file into it.
5. Adjust metadata to ensure that people don't mix this up with the real Droid Sans.
6. Save the result to York.ttf.

Why?

There was a requirement for a font that could be rendered at sizes down to 10pt without antialiasing and without looking terrible, and covered a decent amount of the Unicode BMP.

Droid Sans was the only font that really met these requirements. DejaVu Sans was a close second, but has only 5119 glyphs compared to the ~50000 glyphs in Droid Sans. Noto Sans has better glyph coverage than Droid, but renders poorly at small sizes without antialiasing. Additionally, IBM Plex Sans has good coverage, but also renders unpleasantly at small sizes without antialiasing.

License

https://spdx.org/licenses/Apache-2.0