Downloadable fonts with Jetpack Compose — Android

Having the capability to download a font will reduce the app size, increases the app installation success rate, and multiple apps can share the same font through a provider that improves the overall system health. This feature is already included in the existing UI toolkit with a support library, but what about Jetpack Compose?

Typography with Poppins Font Family

Jetpack Compose 1.2 (in Alpha)

With the addition of the following library, Jetpack Compose 1.2 now supports downloaded fonts.

Just by adding the above library, we are good to go. Now let’s see this in action.

Add download fonts

You might have pre-written Typography in your Type. kt files, so let’s make a new Typography like the one below.

*

Here we are setting the font to the defaultFontFamily parameter of the Typography function.

So we are passing the set of parameters to the getGoogleFontFamily() function which we have created, it takes the name of a font family as the first parameter, provider as the second to which default parameter is supplied and weights as the third parameter where based on weights if the requested font also supports those weight then appropriate weights are fetched.

Now let’s see the getGoogleFontFamily() function

So this function acts like a helper function to fetch the requested downloadable font where it returns the appropriate FontFamily. As you might have observed here in this function we are iterating over the requested weights to create the Font object. Finally, let’s see the provider

So to download fonts we need to provide certain details like authority, package and certificates. As we are using Google Font Provider here so we have provided details accordingly.

Finally our Type.kt file will look something like this

With all those now we have added the support for the downloadable font. Let’s see some examples now

This will set the Poppins font with Semi Bold as font-weight ← — — — — — — — — — — — — — — - →This will set the Poppins font with Regular as font-weight

Adding downloadable font is easy and fun with Jetpack Compose, now before I conclude let me also provide the certificate file which you can also generate through the Android Studio following this
Android Studio Certificate Generator

Also even after following all these steps if the downloadable font is still not working for you then do checkout Internet permission in the Manifest.xml.

I hope you found this article interesting and you are having lots of fun with Jetpack Compose!