Typography for Mobile -- Best Practices Guidance

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

As our new app hits the interface design stage we have endless discussions on the "eye candy" side of the design. Good news is that one of our inhouse team who has been designing for print for 30 years, finally set up a document in InDesign to 736 px X 414px. Yay! Big break through because it means we can get through the design phase faster -- if he is not happy, nothing moves.  So he can participate and I usually don't worry too much, as long as the UX is strong. But then what I can do may turn out "ugly."  So far I have pretty much able to match anything thrown at me from Indesign and Illustrator with native LC objects with a little patient tweaking of object props.  (only major gap there is the inability to bring in vector as a single object)

But, we need advice here on best practices for typography in LC for Mobile that I can share with the team

Questions seem simple enough (I hope it is)

1) Assuming we want to avoid loading fonts into LC

If we use the Droid family... is that available  on iOS?  if so, how do you specify that so that it is not substituted for Roboto on Android (the Droid font is so much better looking)

If not, what can we use that will

a) work on Mac Desktop

b) work the same on iOS (I'm having trouble there myself with a font that is huge on the desktop and smaller on the iPHone -- as if the metrics were completely different, even though I'm working in 736 X 414 px in both platforms)

c) be substituted on Android, but still have the same look and feel?

2) Were we to load a font in LC, are display results "robustly predictable" across all devices. Typically where one gets bitten is the line length  and or X heights/line heights  growsor shrink relative to the original design. If the design of a particular "module" mandates some precision on the formatted height of the field/label/visible name etc.  you are then in big trouble.

I can start from ground zero, search the web etc... but I'm sure other LC developers have "been there done that" ... can you share your insights?

Mahalo!
BR