Neither the announcement or the git repo even have an example of what the font looks like. It is like announcing a new copy of the Mona Lisa not having a picture of it.

Nor did they have a link to simply download the font files. You can do that here: https://www.google.com/fonts#UsePlace:use/Collection:Roboto

They linked to the github repo linked in the first line of the announcement, you'll find the font files (ttf) in the 'hinted' directory.

https://github.com/google/roboto

As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about fonts, but who is interested in a decent font being made open source, I would never think to look in the "hinted" directory.

Out of interest, why is it called "hinted" and not "example" or something? I'm guessing it's font lingo?

Yes it's font lingo for sure :)

Basically for fonts to look good when placed on a square grid (pixels) there is a method called hinting which as the name implies gives hints to the font renderer on how the fonts should be drawn across this grid in order to best preserve the intended look of the font and be readable, this has the greatest impact when you are using a very limited size grid such as in small font sizes.

As someone who has ADD: yes, font lingo. It has to do with render alignment and the fact that pixels aren't round. It is amazing the level of complexity underlying font rendering, look at the internals for lcd filter weights some time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting

Agreed, that was bothersome.

Here's the font: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto

Wow, look at the stats on that font - https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto#stats - 9,979,683,779 is a lot of views in one week.

They say they keep updating it, which kind of makes me wonder what the best way is to keep up to date with the newest versions. Is there an automated way to do that? I don't like to manually check every other month if a font has a new version, and cloning the repo seems overkill if all I want is the output.

Oh wow, they got rid of the Helvetica-style R entirely. Good riddance, that's my least favorite thing about Helvetica.

I really appreciated they decided to blow away all the Helvetica characteristics and go straight for an inspired variation of Akzidenz-Grotesk. It looks great on print!

It's really come a long way since launch.

http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-f...

Kudos to Stephen Coles for keeping that article updated as the font has evolved and improved.

The K's with the flat middle were horrible. Interesting that they were the only characters poached from Ronnia and now replaced with something more familar.

You can use Monotype Skyfonts, which has a free service for downloading and syncing the Google Fonts collection:

http://www.fonts.com/web-fonts/google

Thanks for the tip! Too bad that I run Ubuntu, not Windows or OSX. I'll keep it bookmarked in case I ever switch again though :)

Install typecatcher from the archive, it's a graphical program that will let you fetch and install google fonts. It has previews and so on, nice app.

You say in another comment that you use Ubuntu. With Arch I'd make my own package to manage this, if one didn't exist. It's quite easy with Arch, but I'm not really sure whether that's the case with Ubuntu. I've definitely found packaging to be a skill worth having.

The second page spelling OCD... it is a freudian slip or it is an innocent confession?

If anyone here is from the google fonts website, theres a typo in this document:

"Bold 8.5/12pt Roboto supports 16 weights as well as advanced typographic features such as smallc aps"

Is the lighter or the darker blue outline the new one? I'm still at a loss to say which one looks better or why.

The darker blue outline (with the straight leg on the "R") is the newer one.

Dark blue is the new one.