4

I'm looking for a Helvetica font alternative for Android. It seems that this font is not included in Android, but is in iOS. What would be a good alternative?

--EDIT--

In addition to the answer below, a colleague found that Raleway-Thin.ttf is close to Helvetica.

industrychanger
  • 563
  • 1
  • 9
  • 21
  • Do they have Arial? As much as I hate Arial, it's the standard Helvetica replacement. – Joe Z Dec 15 '13 at 19:09
  • @JoeZ it looks like Android doesn't support Arial either, unless a .ttf file is added to the project: http://stackoverflow.com/q/16183660/3006350 – industrychanger Dec 15 '13 at 19:26

1 Answers1

5

Android uses the Roboto font, which is a really nice looking font, with a few different weights (regular, light, thin, condensed) that look great on high density screens.

If you want to use a custom font (like helvetica), you will need to implement custom textview/edittext widgets that use that font.

Boken
  • 4,825
  • 10
  • 32
  • 42
athor
  • 6,848
  • 2
  • 34
  • 37
  • 12
    Your second link is broken. – DroidDev Apr 25 '14 at 12:55
  • I believe this has changed since this answer has been written. See the `create*` functions in the [Typeface](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Typeface.html) class. – MasterMastic Jul 11 '17 at 01:49