@MicroDrie thanks for your reply. I am not a font expert so I am not sure I got completely the point. both the font and the text file are exactly the ones taken from Erel's example and actually the LoadData function is taken from that example as it is.
as for using the chr(), I use the CharAt calculated in the LoadData which I believe is the same thing, but I may be wrong.
the only way that I found to reproduce what the user is seeing is commenting the line where I load the font for the listview in the Activity_create. So if I do:
lstIcons.SingleLineLayout.Label.TextSize = 30
lstIcons.SingleLineLayout.ItemHeight = 45dip
'lstIcons.SingleLineLayout.Label.Typeface = Typeface.LoadFromAssets("materialdesignicons-webfont.ttf")
the SingleLineLayout.Label object does not load the webfont font and it shows:
which to me makes sense as the SingleLineLayout.Label probably uses at that point its default font which of course is not the webfont.
This makes me think that
Typeface.LoadFromAssets("materialdesignicons-webfont.ttf")
for some reasons fails, but i know that the app did not crash as the user did not complain and I did not see any crash on the google development console.
any more ideas?