Home/ Questions/Q 4565670
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-21T18:40:36+00:00

I have a custom font that won’t seem to load on Android. Specifically I

  • 0

I have a custom font that won’t seem to load on Android.
Specifically I load it in the normal manner from an Activity, and then set it on a TextView:

AssetManager assetManager = getAssets();
Typeface tf = Typeface.createFromAsset(assetManager, "euro.ttf");      
textView.setTypeface(tf);

What I get doesn’t match the custom font at all, and there don’t seem to be any errors (I’ve looked through logcat and didn’t notice anything).

I’ve read an old article that says Android has issues with some fonts and silently fails over to Droid Sans.

Note that Android does not seem to
like all TrueType fonts. I spent a lot
of time trying to figure out what I
was doing wrong with this sample,
before switching to a different font,
and everything “just worked”. When
Android dislikes a custom font, rather
than raise an Exception, it seems to
substitute Droid Sans (“sans”)
quietly. So, if you try to use a
different font and it does not seem to
be working, it may be that the font in
question is incompatible with Android,
for whatever reason.

So my question is, does anybody know how I can troubleshoot this further. Or what the “whatever reason” may be? I’ve tried different names for the font file, and even different copies of it. The font file seems to work fine on my desktop (I can open it with OS X and see the characters, they look correct). Also, using a different ttf file for another font does seem to work (so it doesn’t seem to be setup/code related, rather it must be something with the file itself).

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sorry, I haven’t run into anything more on this since I wrote that post nearly (gasp!) three years ago.

    If you have access to a font editor, you might consider opening the font file and re-saving it, to see if that clears up whatever issues may be in there.

    Or, if there’s some utility floating around that basically does a “glyph diff” — reporting which glyphs are in font A and not font B — you might see if there’s something interesting missing in the font you’re trying. From what I’ve seen, a missing glyph normally just results in a garbage character (e.g., empty square), but maybe there’s something special Android depends upon that your desired font does not have.

    Push come to proverbial shove, if you have access to a font editor, you could try copying glyphs from the failing font file to a new font file and see if you wind up with something that works.

    :: insert obligatory watch-for-font-licensing-issues blurb here ::

    I seem to recall it took me a few tries to find a free font that worked, back in ’08.

    • 0