Moodle conversion of Droid Serif font to Oi decorative font

Two students submitted documents to Moodle that had the following appearance in the Moodle Grader viewer. This was the result of a font substitution, not an intentional choice by the student.

Document in Moodle viewer

The substituted font appears to possibly be Oi. The students did not use a decorative bold font. The document had been composed using the Droid family of fonts.

Document as seen in Microsoft Word after download

Microsoft Word on MacOS displays the font name as being Droid Serif, but the displayed text is clearly a substituted sans serif font. The students composed their documents on Chromebook laptops using Google Docs and Droid Serif prior to submission to Moodle.

The downloaded Word document as seen after upload into Google Docs

Uploading the Microsoft Word document to Google Docs leads to display of the Oi font even though Microsoft Word was displaying Droid Serif as the font. Attempts to restore Droid Serif in Google Docs were unsuccessful on both a laptop and in the Google Docs app. Droid Serif has been phased out on Google platforms. Droid Sans was succeeded by Open Sans and more recently by Noto Sans. Noto serif, however, is not directly available in Google Docs, at least not here. There are some localized versions of Droid Serif in other languages. In lieu of Droid serif, the following is the same text in Roboto serif, another successor to the Droid family.

Document in Roboto serif: Close to what the student probably saw on their devices

Many students here operate on older Android phones and ChromeOS laptops that have aged out of upgrades. This leads to some apps using deprecated fonts that were the default font in older versions of Android or ChromeOS. These students would be advised to use an alternative font for their documents. 

The other curious feature of this exploration was that the downloaded docx file consistently crashed Libreoffice.org on MacOS running on Apple M3 silicon. Only Microsoft Word could open and render the downloaded files without crashing. Microsoft Word, as seen above, renders the paragraph in a substituted sans serif font, perhaps from the Helvetica family of fonts. 

One other puzzle is why the substitution of Oi. In the past there were software packages that chose the next font in alphabetic order. Oi is certainly not being selected that way. Oi also appears to have very different metrics from Droid. Perhap the "oi" in Droid Serif somehow triggered the substitution, but that seems unlikely. Oi! was derived from Caslon’s Ionic in 1844 and Clarendon by Fann Street Foundry in 1845, and was designed by Kostas Bartsokas. 

Post-script 05 February 2025

The Droid Sans issue has also appeared in spreadsheet submissions. The issue appears to be older Chromebooks which still have the now deprecated Droid Sans font, which displays as Oi! in the Moodle grader.

A spreadsheet submission as seen in the Moodle grader

Upon download and opening with LibreOffice.org, which did not crash when opening the downloaded spreadsheet, LibreOffice.org displays the spreadsheet with a substituted sans serif while displaying Droid Sans as the font. 

The same spreadsheet downloaded and opened in Libreoffice.org

Uploading the spreadsheet into Google Sheets reveals a conversion to Oi! which is listed as Oi. 

Google Sheets running on MacOS displaying the Oi font

While still difficult to read, the result is not the illegible mess that displayed in Moodle. There is nothing being done to cause Google Sheets to display Oi, this is happening automatically. Droid Sans is not available and for some reason Oi! is displayed as a substitute font. 

Follow-up

The cause of this for spreadsheets was found to be that the file accessed using copy-on-link was originally done on an older Chromebook in Droid Sans. Every students was receiving a copy of a file formatted in Droid Sans. The issue in Google Docs is older Chromebooks that default to Droid Sans for new documents. The issue for the spreadsheet assignments was a template done in Droid Sans. Related but different issues. Changing the template font solves the issue. Open Sans appears to work well as an alternate.

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