Question

I was wondering, what are the advantages (besides having a differenciating font) and making using it according the the trademark of a product of using a custom font?

But more important, what are the real disadvantages? I read in this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/4734610/327011 that at least OTF has problems, some of which manifestat even more in specific devices according to the PPI.

So, for those who have use and those who don’t because they don’t think they should, what are your opinions and arguments?

Thanks

Answer 1

Besides what CommonsWare said, (that was my first accepted answer), I have found a major bug, that creates memory leaks when using Custom Fonts:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9904#c7

Because of this, I tend to think that it is not a good ideia to use them.. or at least beware when you use them!

If you do need to use them, you can use this to avoid the biggest part of the memory leaks:

public class Typefaces {
    private static final String TAG = "Typefaces";

    private static final Hashtable<String, Typeface> cache = new Hashtable<String, Typeface>();

    public static Typeface get(Context c, String assetPath) {
        synchronized (cache) {
            if (!cache.containsKey(assetPath)) {
                try {
                    Typeface t = Typeface.createFromAsset(c.getAssets(),
                            assetPath);
                    cache.put(assetPath, t);
                } catch (Exception e) {
                    Log.e(TAG, "Could not get typeface '" + assetPath
                            + "' because " + e.getMessage());
                    return null;
                }
            }
            return cache.get(assetPath);
        }
    }
}