Roboto vs Helvetica Neue: Can you distinguish the new Android typeface?

I don't get it. Aside from the block capitals, they are pretty distinguishable. Roboto's verticals are generally thicker. The round letters are taller and less round. Roboto has a bit of a curve on the long lines, for example at the bottom of the W. Helvetica's straight lines are actually straight. Roboto has trapezoidal stems on qrpgdb, and the curved lines on those letters get a lot thinner near the vertical. The k has a horizontal bar. The ascenders on lowercase letters are taller than capital letters, but Helvetica keeps them the same height.<p>Edit: of course this doesn't even account for kerning, punctuation, etc.

Wasn't this covered already with "Arial vs. Helvetia"? (<a href="http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/" rel="nofollow">http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica...</a>)<p>I think what's going to distinguish these fonts isn't their individual character forms (which I do think are significantly different, perhaps even more so than Arial and Helvetica), but their optimisations. That is, how Roboto has been given ligatures, kerning, and hinting to make it work well on mobile phone screens at the sizes it'll be rendered at.<p>(Also, the typewar quiz is a little unfair: it's hard to scrutinise character width and it doesn't seem to include numerals---areas where there are quite noticeable differences between the two.)

I commented here as well: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3130877" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3130877</a>, but does it really make sense to compare individual letters of fonts? I'd think that a well designed font would be able to convey a different feel when looking at large bodies of text (larger than single letters, at least) via subtle nuances, even if individual letters look like those in a different font.

Friends, I'm afraid the news is even worse than originally reported. Apparently not only does Roboto copy Helvetica, but it apparently also simultaneously copies Ascender Corp's Liberation Sans, URW++'s Nimbus Sans L, and Microsoft's Arial! And the investigation has only begun--it is too early to determine how many other Helvetica clones it might have copied.

(Disclosure: I did the understatement.com piece)<p>I agree with many of the points people are making (there are some differences, there are many Helvetica/etc based fonts, etc). Really the most amusing thing to me is that Google made a big deal out of the type change - it was the first point in their Ice Cream Sandwich launch. Can you imagine if at Apple's iPhone 4/iOS 4 launch they said "and our first big feature is: we're dropping Helvetica! For Helvetica Neue!"

Beyond the similarities there are some interesting comments from professionals and responses by the Roboto designer here:<p><a href="http://typographica.org/2011/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four-headed-frankenstein/" rel="nofollow">http://typographica.org/2011/on-typography/roboto-typeface-i...</a>

They're clearly distinguishable on both paragraphs and individual glyphs to me.

That site is excruciatingly slow. I had to wait 20 seconds for every page!

I have a better question: Does anyone care? Seriously? The debate has degenerated to whether Google is ripping off Apple's choice of <i>font</i>? WTF?