OMG! Reader Nicholas Ipsen dropped by our inbox earlier today to show us some sweet Ubuntu font action in Android.
As you might expect, the new font that Canonical contracted type foundry Dalton Maag to design looks brilliant on Google’s mobile operating system.
Some screenshots:
Install the Ubuntu font on Android
Nicholas kindly provided us with some step by step installation instructions, for those of you who are daring (and have a rooted phone!):
1. Copy the fonts “Ubuntu-R” and “Ubuntu-B” from “/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font family” to the root folder of your phone’s SD card.
2. Open a terminal emulator on your phone, or use the adb shell command from a PC connected via USB (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=502010)
3. Type mount, then find the line which shows the block device mounted on /system. In my case the line looks like this: “/dev/block/mtdblock3 on /system type yaffs2 (ro,relatime)”
4. Now enter this command, using the information you just acquired:
mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
5. Now we make sure we have the right permissions:
chmod 777 /system/fonts/*
6. Finally, we move the fonts from the SD card to the /system/fonts folder, while taking a backup of the old fonts:
mv /system/fonts/DroidSans.ttf /system/fonts/DroidSans.ttf.bak && mv /system/fonts/DroidSans-Bold.ttf /system/fonts/DroidSans-Bold.ttf.bak && mv /sdcard/Ubuntu-R.ttf /system/fonts/DroidSans.ttf && mv /sdcard/Ubuntu-B.ttf /system/fonts/DroidSans-Bold.ttf
7. To make absolutely sure we didn’t mess up any permissions, run:
chown root:root /system/fonts/*
8. Now reboot your phone, and the UI should be using the Ubuntu font!
Thanks to Nicholas for the sweet tip!