Greetings!

With the launching of MySword 3.3, many fonts are made available for download today (16 October 2012).

The Deja Vu Sans Condensed and Deja Vu Serif Condensed were also updated because there is a Android-specific CSS @font-face bug that made the bold italic combination only displaying as italic without the bold. Besides, these fonts were also updated to the latest version 2.33 (the old version was 2.32).

Font Classification

As of MySword 3.3, there are now 4 types of fonts that can be set in the Preferences:

  1. Font
    • the Standard Font
  2. Alternate Greek Font
    • You can now use a Standard Font that do not support Greek for English and for the Greek text in the Bible or other modules, the Alternate Greek Font will be used if specified.
  3. Alternate Hebrew Font
    • You can now also use a different Alternate Hebrew Font.
    • Note that because of ICS and Jellybean bug, Roboto font is used in case of the presence of nikkud.
  4. Alternate Extended Latin Font
    • This is useful for TS1998 as well as the transliteration in Strong's dictionary.
Consequently, fonts for download are classified under these categories:
  1. Most Complete - with accented Greek, for TS1998
    • Fonts under this are the most Unicode-complete font though there are some exceptions like Deja Vu Serif and Deja Vu Serif Condensed do not have Hebrew glyphs yet. These fonts can be used for most languages and can be used as the Standard Font, Alternate Greek, Hebrew or Extended Latin.
    • Formerly, we only allowed most complete fonts like Deja Vu Sans Condensed and Deja Vu Serif Condensed because there is no facility yet for automatically selecting Greek, Hebrew or Extended Latin for content requiring such making the text show squares or question marks if the glyph is not present in the font.
  2. Complete - with accented Greek, not for TS1998
    • This next class of font has accented Greek which can be used for SBLGNT but since the Extended Latin is incomplete, it cannot be used for TS1998 or many modules in other European languages using Extended Latin characters or so.
  3. Greek - good alternate font
    • You can now use Cardo, Galatia SIL or SBL Greek fonts. Note that Cardo is under the Complete category.
    • You can also use those fonts from the Most complete or Complete categories.
  4. Hebrew - good alternate font
    • You can now use Cardo, Ezra SIL or SBL Hebrew fonts. Note that Cardo is under the Complete category.
    • You can also use some of the fonts in the Most complete category.
  5. English/Latin - for TS1998
    • Fonts under this category do not have complete Greek or Hebrew characters but have exellent Extended Latin support.
  6. Basic English/Latin - not for TS1998, no Greek/Hebrew
    • Many other Free fonts and notably Google fonts are light-weight and do not have complete Greek and Extended Latin support and normally do not have Hebrew as well as other languages. This is to make the font faster to download when used in web pages as web fonts. But because MySword 3.3 now supports four kinds of fonts, it is now possible to use any of these light-weight but nice fonts as Standard font and setting the other 3 fonts to appropriate ones so that Greek, Hebrew and Extended Latin characters are displayed properly.
    • Note that you can also create your own font files by just creating a CSS file with the name of the font and fill it up by trying to study the contents of any of the downloadable fonts for MySword. You will need to use the proper order of @font-face declaration: regular first, bold second, italic third then bold/italic last.
If you want to see examples of these fonts when displayed, take a look at the individual screen shots in the download page.

Android Font Bugs

Note that there are bugs/issues in different versions of Android related to using fonts via CSS @font-face in WebView (the Android component used by MySword):

  1. Eclair (Android 2.1)
    • Not supported (not working because of a known bug)
  2. Froyo (Android 2.2)
    • Supported but Hebrew is not displayed as Right-To-Left (RTL) if there are vowel diacritical marks (nikkud), otherwise it is RTL.
  3. Gingerbread (Android 2.3)
    • Hebrew is not displayed as Right-To-Left (RTL) if there are vowel diacritical marks (nikkud), otherwise it is RTL. Arabic content suffers similarly.
    • @font-face Memory leak bug is also reported. For example, using Deja Vu Sans Condensed, one page refresh may cost you around 2 MB of precious memory (looks like caused by caching of the font). The Stock browser which also used WebView suffers from this. Tip:
      • You can still use fonts in MySword in Gingerbread by using small sized fonts like Arvo, Josefina Sans, Tinos and most of the fonts under Basic English/Latin.
      • Do not use Cardo, Charis SIL, Free Serif (the biggest font file size and not advisable in Gingerbread), Free Sans and Junicode.
      • Least memory leak for accented Greek: Crimson Text.
      • Least memory leak for TS1998: Deja Vu Serif and Deja Vu Serif Condensed.
  4. Honeycomb 3.0/3.1
    • Causes a crash so font download is disabled in MySword. However, Hebrew is displayed RTL even for nikkud and the diacritical marks are not shifted unlike in ICS. You will have to be satisfied with the standard Android font (Droid Sans) though.
  5. Honeycomb 3.2
    • So far this is the best version of Android if you are reading Hebrew a lot. Fonts can be changed, Hebrew is displayed RTL even for nikkud, the diacritical marks are not shifted unlike in ICS and the memory leak bug fixed.
  6. ICS
    • Hebrew is displayed RTL even for nikkud but the diacritical marks are shifted and not properly aligned. Also, if the Hebrew text contains diacritical marks, your selected font will not take effect but Roboto font (the default font in ICS) will automatically be used by Android. This is already a known and reported (to Google) bug.
  7. Jellybean
    • The Hebrew diacritical marks shifting bug is corrected but the Roboto bug is still present.
  8. Key Lime Pie
    • Let's pray that the remaining Hebrew Roboto bug will be fixed by Google for this version.

Download Fonts

You may download these Fonts by going to the Download page:

Alternatively, you can also download them directly via MySword running in your Android device. Just go to Menu->More->Download modules. Then select the module type, language (if any), then the modules, and start downloading.

Enjoy reading God's Word!