How can one contribute additions to Droid fonts used in Android?

[Xelgen]

Dear all,
We a group of enthusiasts were able to find funding and get a set of
Armenian alphabet glyps developed for Droid fonts.

Glyphs were created by one of the best and most experienced Armenian
font Designer Ruben Hakobyan (http://tarumian.am/). They correspond in
style to glyphs of other alphabets and to Unicode 6.0 standard.
All 3 fonts Droid Sans, Droid Serif and Droid Mono, with all their
styles Regular, Bold, Italig, Bold Italic.
Hinting was also done for them, and I'm and all armenian users are
quite happy with results.
The work is relased under public domain.

Now I'm wondering how we can contribute those changes to official
project, so they get involved in future relases of Android platform.
As fonts, (ttf files) are not exactly source code, I wasn't able to
find anything in Android code trunk.

I'll highly appreciate if someone can point me a way to add them or a
person in charge of (Droid) fonts for Android.

Android phones and devices are becoming popular in Armenia, and their
major drawback remians lack of support (simply displaying) of Armenian
language.

Thanks,
Aleksey Chalabyan

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

Wow, that's exciting :)

The core fonts themselves are maintained by Ascender. I don't know if
anyone from Ascender follows this list (or if anyone here has contacts
with them).

I can imagine 3 approaches:
-Coordinate with Ascender to have them include the glyphs into their
copy of the fonts. In that case it might be easier if the new glyphs
were licensed as Apache2 instead of being public domain, though
Ascender would know best what works for them.

-Submit them as separate font files, and have a build-time tool that
combines them with Ascender's fonts to create single ttf files that
Android can use.

-Submit them as separate font files and install them as such on
Android, and modify Android's run-time code to fall back to reading
those glyphs from the separate files.

JBQ

--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Software Engineer, Android Open-Source Project, Google.

Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further
warning.

[Xelgen]

Thanks for your promptly answer Jean,

Currently we have them merged into .ttf files of official Droid
version (if I remember right taken from Android SDK 2.2).
And if one roots the phone and changes native fonts with our modified
version, they get pretty nice Armenian support, while not losing
native look and feel of system. But sure it's not an option for mass
market.

So I believe 1st option will work out best, I'm just not sure if
Ascender would be interested enough in doing that, unless Google will
ask them.
I believe it would be more efficient if communication will go not just
between us and Ascender, but someone from Android/Google team, as
well.

Do you think you’ll be able to check who from Android team,
coordinates work with Ascender?

Changing license to any free license required by Ascender and/or
Google is not an issue. Especially as files haven’t been actually
published yet.

I'll provide some screenshots and files itself later (most probably
during weekend).
Armenian users of Android (worldwide, with about 2/3 of Armenian
speaker leaving outside of Armenia) and Android phone selling
companies in Armenian seem to be also excited about that.
So I hope we’ll be able to work this out soon.

Thanks again for your support,
Aleksey a.k.a Xelgen