The Google Android operating system was defined to run on smartphones with 4 inch or smaller displays. And one of the ways Android makes text look good on a screen that small is to use a custom family of fonts including Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono, and Droid Serif. The Droid Family fonts were developed by Ascender Corporation’s Steve Matteson, and it turns out they look good on all sorts of small screens, not just netbook.

That’s because these fonts take up less screen space than many other fonts, while still making text easy to read.

Installing the Droid fonts on a netbook running Ubuntu Linux is ridiculously easy. Just open a terminal window and type: sudo apt-get install ttf-droid. That’s it.

If you’re running Windows, you can download the fonts and install them one at a time by right-clicking on each and selecting the “install” option.

Ascender also offers Pro versions of the Droid fonts for designers.

via Ubuntu on Mini

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4 replies on “How to install Android fonts on a netbook”

  1. Just installed the Droid fonts on the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop of my ASUS 1005PE and they look so much better than the previous FreeSans I was using. Also, the Droid Mono is very nice for coding. My new favourites!

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