Roboto: Google’s signature font is now open source

The Roboto family of fonts, and the toolchain used in creating it, are now an open source project. Roboto is Google’s signature font, created by Google designer Christian Robertson. It is the default font used in Android and Chrome OS, and is the recommended font for Google’s visual language, Material Design.

The font files for the Roboto family of fonts were first released under the Apache license as part of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) in 2011. With this launch, we are making Roboto a true open source project, with a revamped font production toolchain that is completely based on open source software.

Another key improvement in the Roboto font family has been the vast expansion of its character coverage to include all Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters in Unicode 7.0, as well as the currency symbol for the Georgian lari, to be published in Unicode 8.0. For the expansion, the number of glyphs provided in the fonts more than tripled in number, going from around 13,000 (1071 per font) to more than 40,000 (3350 per font). An earlier version of the expanded font family is included in Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and later.

This project involved close collaboration between various teams at Google: Material Design, Internationalization Engineering, Google Fonts and Android.

The Roboto open source project lives at https://github.com/google/roboto. Bug reports and other contributions are welcome.

By Roozbeh Pournader, Android Text team

Google Summer of Code coding has begun!

Today is the first day of coding for our 11th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year more than 1,046 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 137 different open source organizations.

We are excited to see the contributions this year’s students will make to the open source community.

For more information on important dates for the program please visit our timeline. Stay tuned as we will highlight some of the new mentoring organizations over the next few months.

Have a great summer!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs

Pie in your face — without the mess

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google is back with an exciting new release for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android game) to add support for Google Cardboard, letting you jump into the action directly using your Android phone as a virtual reality headset! Select your targets by looking at them and throw pies with a flick of the switch.

Look out for incoming pie!

We used the Cardboard SDK for Android, which helps simplify common virtual reality tasks like head tracking, rendering for Cardboard, and handling specialized input events. And you might remember us from before, bringing exciting game technologies like FlatBuffers, Pindrop, and Motive, all of which you can see in use in Pie Noon.

You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon on Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we brought an existing game into virtual reality.

By Anthony Maurice, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

GSoC 2015 Stats Part 2: Universities

For the second statistics post for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015 we focus on the universities that our accepted students attend. With this being the 11th year of GSoC we have listed the top 11 schools with the highest number of accepted students for 2015. You’ll notice many familiar names on the list with a couple of new additions to the list. Congratulations to the International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad for claiming the top spot for the second consecutive year.

University	Country	# of Accepted Students in 2014	# of Accepted Students in 2015
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	69	62
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	44	44
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	26	18
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	25	15
Budapest University of Technology and Economics	Hungary	12	14
University POLITEHNICA Of Bucharest	Romania	17	14
Bejing (Peking) University	China	5	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	India	15	13
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi	India	13	12
National University of Singapore	Singapore	14	11
University of Buea	Cameroon	3	10

As no surprise, the majority of this year’s students are enrolled in Computer Science, IT and other technical degree programs. GSoC is by no means only for those pursuing CS degrees though — in 2015 we have students pursuing degrees in fields including Astronomy, Geomatics, Law, Music, Oceanography and Philosophy.

A big thank you to all of the professors, schools and alumni who support the Google Summer of Code program. The goal of GSoC is to get students excited about open source development, help build their coding skills and gain real world experience working with open source software projects. We hope that the experience will help them in their careers regardless of the university they attend.

For more statistics on this year’s program check out our country post and be on the lookout for more GSoC 2015 statistics posts in the coming weeks.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with KDE

The KDE community was one of the twelve mentoring organizations which took part in Google Code-in 2014, our open source coding contest for 13 to 17 year old students. Mentor and co-administrator Heena Mahour wrote in to tell us about the students’ accomplishments with KDE.

KDE is an international free software community. We’re best known for the Plasma Desktop which is the default for several Linux distributions, but we produce an entire integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and OS X systems. We’re also an umbrella project for many standalone applications based on our technology.

The KDE community participated in Google Code-in (GCI) to inspire young contributors and offer them an opportunity to get involved with KDE and open source. We created 277 tasks for students to choose from, and 29 mentors volunteered to help the students with their work. Of the many projects that are part of KDE, the team behind the Marble virtual globe created the most tasks for us with 50. We also provided 65 different beginner tasks to help students without any experience take their first step as an open source contributor before moving on to more challenging tasks.

Tasks in GCI come in several categories. We offered 190 coding tasks, 26 for documentation and training, and 41 for quality assurance. It was a joy for us to see students working with the mentors and learning how to become part of an open source community. At the end of the contest, 240 tasks had been completed!

Like every organization taking part, we were able to select two students as Grand Prize Winners. From the students who completed the most tasks successfully, we considered the creativity, thoroughness, and quality of their work. Mikhail Ivchenko from Russia and Ilya Kowalewski from Ukraine were selected as our winners and will soon be visiting Google’s headquarters along with the other GCI winners.

We’re all grateful for the opportunity GCI gave us to work with these enthusiastic young students and get them involved with KDE. We hope to continue seeing their names in the future -- keep it up, everyone!

by Heena Mahour, KDE mentor and co-administrator

GSoC 2015 stats part 1: All about the countries

As we gear up for the start of the 11th Google Summer of Code, we’ve been putting together some interesting numbers and stats for this year’s program.  Every year within minutes of the accepted students being announced, we are asked “how many students from my country were accepted?” and “how many students from my school were accepted?” We’ll be answering these kinds of questions with a few posts over the next few weeks, starting today.

Let’s start with our country-specific stats. Last year when we decided to list all of the countries with accepted students it was a huge hit, so why mess with success? The 73 countries represented by this year’s 1,051 GSoC accepted students are listed alphabetically below.

Argentina	2		Kuwait	1
Armenia	1		Lithuania	1
Australia	4		Luxembourg	2
Austria	8		Malaysia	1
Bangladesh	1		Mexico	5
Belarus	6		Moldavia	2
Belgium	2		Morocco	1
Brazil	15		Netherlands	10
Bulgaria	2		New Zealand	2
Cameroon	12		Nigeria	1
Canada	23		Norway	3
Chile	1		Pakistan	2
China	49		Paraguay	1
Colombia	2		Peru	2
Croatia	4		Philippines	2
Czech Republic	3		Poland	33
Denmark	1		Portugal	13
Dominican Republic	1		Romania	19
Ecuador	1		Russian Federation	38
Egypt	7		Singapore	11
Estonia	1		Slovak Republic	6
Finland	5		South Korea	5
France	18		Spain	30
Germany	50		Sri Lanka	58
Greece	9		Sweden	3
Guatemala	1		Switzerland	5
Honduras	1		Taiwan	2
Hong Kong	4		Tunisia	2
Hungary	23		Turkey	8
India	335		Uganda	1
Indonesia	1		Ukraine	8
Ireland	3		United Arab Emirates	3
Italy	19		United Kingdom	13
Jamaica	1		United States	127
Japan	6		Uruguay	1
Kazakhstan	1		Vietnam	2
Kenya	4

We have two countries being represented by students for the first time this year: Kuwait and United Arab Emirates - welcome to the GSoC family! With these two additions, we now have 103 countries where students have been accepted into the GSoC program since 2005.

As you may have seen in recent posts, there are many students and mentors throughout Africa and all around the world working very hard to spread the word about GSoC to their communities. We are happy to announce that Cameroon quadrupled their number of accepted students in 2015 to 12!

In our upcoming posts, we will delve deeper into the stats by looking at the universities with the most accepted students, degrees sought by students, gender numbers, and mentor stats. If you have other questions that you’d like to ask, please leave a comment on this post and we will try to answer your question in an upcoming post.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs