24 ms·

Google Noto Fonts

1217 points by bpierre 10y ago

cag_ii 10y ago
Related blog post here: https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-font-system-for-everyone.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-fon...
- Splendor 10y ago
  > "Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters." Wow. That's a lot of work.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    Indeed but worth it if you are Google though.
    - vnglst 10y ago
      How is this worth it for Google? Honest question, always wondered what Google gets out Google Fonts.
      - duskwuff 10y ago
        Most of the fonts on Google Fonts are not, in fact, authored by Google. They're just distributing them, which is relatively cheap. The Noto family is an exception.
      - WA 10y ago
        Traffic insights for websites that don't use Google Analytics.
        Klathmon 10y ago
        Per their Fonts API ToS they don't track anything except total aggregate usage per font.
        jeremy_wiebe 10y ago
        That only works if you use Google's hosted fonts though, right?
        Sylos 10y ago
        Yeah, but that's still plenty of webpages.
        jrockway 10y ago
        Except the fonts are cacheable for a year, so you won't be pinging Google on every site that uses Google Fonts. It wouldn't be a very good tracking mechanism, if that's what it were intended for.
      - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
        Well, they can track people across sites that use Google Fonts, so maybe having a larger set of characters and encouraging more use gives them a farther tracking reach.
        kps 10y ago
        https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...
        lallysingh 10y ago
        For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users? The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently. Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail. In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers.
        pflats 10y ago
        Google also said that their new messaging app would be end-to-end encrypted by default, and then quickly changed their mind when business reasons prevailed. Business reasons will always prevail. But even beyond that: >For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail. That's not what the snippet says. It is a technical statement, not a privacy statement. It doesn't mean they can't track you, it means it's a tiny bit harder to track you. Nothing in there says "we don't cross-reference these data" or "these data aren't used for tracking purposes" or anything else. Just that your Google account information isn't sent to the font servers. More relevantly, the Google Fonts privacy policy links to the general Google privacy policy, which doesn't have any special "if you're using Google Fonts we collect a whole lot less than this" subsection. They might be using the data. They might not be. They might not be using the data today but decide to start using it tomorrow.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > How is this worth it for Google? Text is more easily consumed by Google services (Search, Now, etc.) than, e.g., graphical representations, and information is more likely to be stored in text if there are fonts that support presenting the information people want to communicate. Having a font family covering all world languages (and covering the full gamut of Unicode characters) increases the scope of information that can be effectively communicated via text.
      - pmyjavec 10y ago
        Tracking
      - mrb 10y ago
        Google has a deceptively simple incentive to make everything better: better fonts, better browsers, better phones, etc, all this drives increased web adoption, hence increased advertising revenues. PS: I love Noto specifically for its Unicode support. I use it on my blog. It's also the default "serif" font on Chrome for Android (but not Chrome for Linux).
        dalke 10y ago
        "everything", except where it doesn't. Its Usenet archives suffered from bitrot. Its RSS reader is no more.
        packetslave 10y ago
        Oh, honestly. Yes, Google shut down Reader 3 years ago after providing it for free for 8 years. Get over it and move on with your life already.
        dalke 10y ago
        Why are you so abusive towards me when you agree with me? I'm not knocking them for stopping support for things they don't find sufficiently monetizeable. I disagreed with the statement "Google has a deceptively simple incentive to make everything better", and gave counter-examples. Append something like "... where it helps drive profit", then I've no complaint.
        mrb 10y ago
        Well Google has an incentive to make everything better, but they can't literally work on everything, so they have to pick and choose. For example Google has repeatedly explained Reader was killed because "usage has declined"¹ So this validates my point: they put resources in developing a product, but it doesn't get enough traction, so they kill it and redirect their resources to other projects that will hopefully be more successful and provide more users and ad revenues to Google. ¹ http://googlereader.blogspot.ca/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html http://googlereader.blogspot.ca/2013/03/powering-down-google...
      - skybrian 10y ago
        Although it's not always perfect, Google takes internationalization seriously. Its websites are used all over the world. Having a nice font that supports every language simplifies things.
        jfim 10y ago
        They don't. I18n on Android is seriously awful. For example, Android 5 shipped with an improperly escaped string in the French Canadian localization strings that would cause the phone to reboot in a loop if it was connected to a charger when opening the lockscreen. Even the latest Android version (Nougat) displays the battery as "24 % %" in the French localization, "Press power button twice for camera" has been translated to the near unreadable "App. 2x sur interr. pr activ. app. photo" (roughly "Prs pwr btn 2x fr cam.") and some of the localized strings are comically nonsensical.
        Godel_unicode 10y ago
        "Takes seriously" is orthogonal to "is great at". There are also non-i18n problems in Android which lead to reboots. If you expect the UI to be perfect in every language all the time, consider what you're actually asking.
      - jpatokal 10y ago
        Aside from the obvious benefit to having a Web that's less broken for everybody, one of my previous projects at Google was implementing support for multiple scripts in a mapping product. I literally don't know how I could have pulled this off without Noto: all other alternatives would have involved some combination of subpar quality, incomplete coverage, incompatible appearance or near-impossible license requirements. (Standard disclaimer: I work at Google, but these views are my own, not Google's.)
      - zackelan 10y ago
        > How is this worth it for Google? Anytime you find yourself asking "why is big company X giving away Y for free?" the answer is usually that they're commoditizing their complements: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html Virtually everything Google gives away for free follows this pattern.
      - pmmeyourndas 10y ago
        Well people keep saying they're interested in a better web. What they get out of it is data. If you include Google fonts they can track your users.
  - wibr 10y ago
    110,000 characters is not every symbol in the Unicode standard, though. According to wikipedia Unicode 9.0 contains around 128,000.
    - bonoboTP 10y ago
      Yep, Old Hungarian is still not there, nor anywhere else except for fonts that were specifically designed just for Old Hungarian. I was happy when the script got included in Unicode 8.0 but if fonts don't support it, it's not much use.
    - talideon 10y ago
      It's bloody close though, and no doubt at least a useful chunk of that will eventually be filled out.
- piquadrat 10y ago
  > When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge. That right there is probably the most important ingredient of many moonshot projects.
- saadat 10y ago
  Monotype has published a case study too: http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800-languages-in-a-single-typeface-creating-noto-for-google/ http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800...
eganist 10y ago
So in a nutshell, typefaces which literally span every single defined character? Are there special optimizations implemented for different use cases as well, e.g. screen v. print and sub-varieties of each? Ten years ago with Vista, Microsoft Typography (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Typography/default.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Typography/default.aspx) put out a family of typefaces--Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, etc.--which were optimized specifically for sub-pixel rendering on LCD screens while maintaining on-paper legibility. I'd be cool with Noto not having any such optimization in mind given that the stated objective appears to be to include every defined character, but I do wonder if it should happen eventually. ...or maybe not, who knows. Pixel densities now have approached ludicrous territories. It might just no longer matter at least when we're talking about optimizing for screens.
- the_unknown 10y ago
  At the time I wrote to one of the team members who worked there (maybe a Program Manager - I forget exactly) and they sent me a beautiful book showing off each of the fonts with a description of why the font was made, how it achieves the goals, and some info on the font's designer. I still have it at home - really impressed me with the attention to detail and the self-styled publicity.
  - Adrock 10y ago
    It was called _Now Read This_ and it really is beautiful. As far as I know, it was not intended to be publicly available, but you can buy a copy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft-Collection/dp/B00NRKCS8C https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft-Collection/dp...
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock. Correction, you could buy a copy on Amazon... Own up! Who got the last one?!
- amelius 10y ago
dorianm 10y ago
It was released originally in 2013: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts Such an amazing project
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  I wish Wikipedia redirected m. links to the desktop site if you aren't using a mobile browser.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    Maybe it would make sense, but I personally prefer their mobile site. It's much nicer to read. Not that their desktop site is filled with ads and gibberish, but for whatever reason I like it more.
  - nyolfen 10y ago
    local userscript workaround: https://gist.github.com/jspenguin/11295206 https://gist.github.com/jspenguin/11295206
tcfunk 10y ago
I keep wanting to find a font to use on the portions of my website that contain Japanese, but they are all so big! No way I'm making my visitors download 115MB worth of font just so it looks a little nicer. Edit: Thanks for the tips, I will look into those options :)
- onedognight 10y ago
  What you want is a font subset and google even provides[0] an API to get one. [0] http://thenewcode.com/878/Slash-Page-Load-Times-With-CSS-Font-Subsetting http://thenewcode.com/878/Slash-Page-Load-Times-With-CSS-Fon...
- sirn 10y ago
  The solution (more of a workaround) to this is to cut the font to just JIS X 0208 (containing Kanji level 1 and 2, total of 6,879 characters) or JIS X 0213 subset (containing Kanji level 1-4, total of 11,233 characters). It should cut the character count to the most commonly used ones, which should reduce file size by a lot (or skip JIS X and select only glyph for Kanji level 1 to reduce it even further). There is a Subset Maker Tool[1] (in Japanese) that can do this. But you need to provide the list of characters you want to keep by yourself (searching for JIS第1第2水準漢字 usually helps). If you do not want to do this by yourself, Google also provide a version of Noto Sans that has been stripped down to just JIS X 0208 subset in their Early Access program[1]. [1]: http://opentype.jp/subsetfontmk.htm http://opentype.jp/subsetfontmk.htm [2]: https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+Japanese https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+Japanese
- mutagen 10y ago
  Google's Noto Sans CJK JP contains 9 font files, each about 13MB. You can edit fonts to subset glyphs or glyph sets you expect to use to further reduce the file size, although I suspect the CJK languages are never going to be as easy to get to fast web speeds. The JIS X 0208 subset still weighs in at almost 4 MB for a single OTF.
- acdha 10y ago
  Since you mentioned that your entire site isn't in Japanese, in addition to what other people specified, I would now recommend using the CSS unicode-range selector. That allows you to list a web font declaration with a range of Unicode code points and most modern browsers now implement the optimization where it only downloads the font when text on the page contains a character in that range. I tossed together an example several years ago: http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal-noto-sans/ http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni... The combined example on http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal-noto-sans/single-name.html http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni... has CSS which looks like this: @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSans"), local("Noto Sans"), url(NotoSans-Regular.woff) format("woff"); } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansArmenian"), local("Noto Sans Armenian"), url(NotoSansArmenian-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+530-58F, U+FB13-FB17; } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansBengali"), local("Noto Sans Bengali"), url(NotoSansBengali-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+AD, U+D7, U+F7, U+964-965, U+981-983, U+985-98C, U+98F-990, U+993-9A8, U+9AA-9B0, U+9B2, U+9B6-9B9, U+9BC-9C4, U+9C7-9C8, U+9CB-9CE, U+9D7, U+9DC-9DD, U+9DF-9E3, U+9E6-9FB, U+200B-200D, U+2013-2014, U+2018-2019, U+201C-201D, U+2026, U+20B9, U+2212, U+25CC; } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansCherokee"), local("Noto Sans Cherokee"), url(NotoSansCherokee-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+13A0-13F4; } In modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari you can see that only downloads a few of the many language files available. This also works really nicely with the traditional CSS font stacks if your design goals allow you to specify system fonts which will work for many users so you can have a few local fonts specified before the downloadable one.
capex 10y ago
Refreshing to see the lorem ipsum replaced with something meaningful.
- jagger27 10y ago
  It's better than the quick brown fox too.
  - soperj 10y ago
    not really. It's longer and it misses the letters j,k,v,x, and z. That's almost 20% of the alphabet.
    - adevine 10y ago
      When you select a different language from the search box, though, you see those same sentences translated into the other languages. Wouldn't be possible to get full alphabet coverage in all translation/alphabet combinations.
pat2man 10y ago
Any idea why they don't just merge Roboto and Noto?
- Alex3917 10y ago
  I don't have any inside information, but it seems like they have different goals. Roboto is primarily designed to evoke certain emotions and to display well across devices, whereas Noto is primarily designed to render consistently across languages.
aluminussoma 10y ago
Noto fonts are great. I especially love the OFL licensing. I wanted to include fonts in a mobile application and there was confusion on whether including a GPL version of the fonts would force me to GPL my app - something I could not do. I couldn't find a definite answer. With Noto's OFL licensing, I no longer had that worry.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  I think that you are looking to the GPL from the wrong perspective. I also made this mistake. GPL does not force you to licence your application under GPL. Instead licensing your application under GPL allows you to use other GPL licensed code.
  - zanny 10y ago
    You don't have to use the GPL to link GPL code. You are just required to distribute the final binary under GPL. When you distribute the source files, individual files can be under individual licenses, they just have to all be license compatible with the final license. IE, use GPL code, license header all your own stuff as Apache, distribute the binary as GPL, but anyone else can use your own work under Apache if they want if you are individually licensing all your own files under it, they just could not use the GPL parts without also distributing under GPL.
    - eveningcoffee 10y ago
      Do you know a project where such licensing scheme is used as an acceptable practice? As to be honest, it looks counter productive against GPL ideas.
      - halomru 10y ago
        In my eyes that practise would be equivalent with dual-licensing your code under GPL and the (more liberal) license of your choice. This happens with some frequency. It's a way to honor the GPL idea for the stuff you link to without having to follow GPL ideas for your new code.
memetomancer 10y ago
I'm not installing 500 MB of fonts without a flipping contact sheet on the page :(
- amyjess 10y ago
  You mean a specimen page? I couldn't find one linked from the article, but I found this while Googling: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans
  - memetomancer 10y ago
    thanks, i did mean specimen page, mea culpa. also thx for the link!
ixtli 10y ago
I don't think this communicates the _incredible_ amount of creative and technical work required not only to simply fill out over 100,000 characters in the UTF-8 space but to make them stylistically consistent.
- nkoren 10y ago
  Work, shmurk! Their set of Akkadian glyphs set looks incomplete, and they don't even have Sumerian or Rongorongo. These guys need to stop sleeping on the job! </sarcasm> (Obviously I'm awed...)
  - lisper 10y ago
    Just FYI, this is not sarcasm, it's ironic humor. Not the same thing. Sarcasm is "the use of irony to mock or convey contempt" which is obviously not what you meant.
    - dalke 10y ago
      Also, Rongorongo isn't yet in the Unicode standard. Can't fault a Unicode font for not supporting something which isn't there.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - WhitneyLand 10y ago
      What % of people do you estimate would make that distinction?
      - lisper 10y ago
        Call me old fashioned, but I think it's important to know what words actually mean, and to use the words that mean what you actually intend to convey. To quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." (If you're not familiar with that quote, it worth looking it up and reading it in context.)
eveningcoffee 10y ago
Please do not use these fonts directly from Google servers. This is an another attribute for Google to track the whole browsing traffic. This is too much power for one company.
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  Use them or not, just be aware that Google is tracking them.
- kauegimenes 10y ago
  Its a .zip...
  - Sylos 10y ago
    He's referring to including Google Fonts as font-face into your webpage, so that they are downloaded by each client from Google's server.
- sinatra 10y ago
  On the other hand, letting Google host the fonts will allow your users to use the cached font without needing to waste bandwidth and time unnecessarily. Especially if you already use Google Analytics, I'll say, please let Google host the fonts too.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Google's ToS state that they will not track them beyond simple aggregate numbers of downloads per [time], which they release in their analytics dashboard publicly. Not only that but the cache headers are set to 1 year... That's a pretty shitty tracking system if I've ever seen one.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    ToS are known to change in time. Are you suggesting that if millions of websites use this font then it will be removed when Google changes its ToS?
WallowC_33 10y ago
No slashed-zero (or even center dotted) in the monospace version. smh
fazlerocks 10y ago
We had to stop using this font as it didn't support back tick(`). Try typing ` multiple times in the search box. We had reported this to Google some months back but got no response.
- bumblebeard 10y ago
  Nothing looks wrong to me (Firefox/Debian). Are you sure it's a problem with the font?
- icebraining 10y ago
  I don't get it, what's the problem?
  - taco_emoji 10y ago
    Here's a link to the issue on Github: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/736 https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/736
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tux1968 10y ago
  Don't know what the problem looked like on your system, but there was no apparent problem here on Firefox/Linux.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Chromium/Linux here, I can replicate it on the specimen page. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans Under the 'Styles' section, type: `foo` You'll see the first ` overlap the f. Now erase it all and type: ```` They all overlap each other and show up as just one `. Edit: from what it looks like, the problem is specific to the sans. I can't replicate it with the serif (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif if anyone wants to try).
tobltobs 10y ago
That is great. I am working on a project where I require a font which includes all (or at leas as much as possible) unicode symbols. Until now I was thankful that I could use GNU unifont as a fallback, even if it was ugly. But this will make my app look so much better.
stesch 10y ago
Fun fact: People behind a WatchGuard firewall (default settings) won't see Google fonts (at least in Firefox) because the firewall filters the CORS headers.
- ademarre 10y ago
  What an awful overreach. Firewalls should not ship with defaults that break the internet, and such presumptuous header filtering can actually weaken security.
  - stesch 10y ago
    Filtering X-Frame-Options is bad for security. Filtering anti CSRF headers like in Drupal and ShopWare is bad for security. But this seems to be the current reality with enterprise firewalls. :-( (No, TLS doesn't help in the long run. If your boss wants to know which pages you are reading he will let the experts setup this: https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squid https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squi...)
    - ademarre 10y ago
      Or this WatchGuard HTTPS proxy config: http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en-us/content/en-us/certificates/cert_https_proxy_resign_c.html http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en-us/content...
      - stesch 10y ago
        Nice. I'm just the victim. Whenever I suspect the firewall to be the cause of a problem I use a proxy via a ssh tunnel. As long as it's not forbidden for me to actually solve problems. The list of software that isn't usable behind a WatchGuard firewall (and maybe similar enterprise firewalls) is getting longer and longer. No Google fonts, no Drupal, no ShopWare 5.2, JIRA barely usable, etc.
        10y ago
kccqzy 10y ago
It doesn't seem to support the Tangut script, which is added in Unicode 9.0. It's the first thing I test if a font claims to support all languages in Unicode. In my knowledge, I haven't really seen any general-purpose fonts containing support for Tangut (because probably no one is going to use it). I thought Google has already completed this project, but apparently they haven't yet.
- Mathnerd314 10y ago
  They've completed it up to Unicode 6.0 (released in 2010). Are there any Unicode fonts at all for Tangut? I looked but didn't find any.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    Probably not -- unless you count the proprietary, obfuscated font they use to make the official Unicode charts. Some people snark at Unicode for putting so much more effort into emoji recently than they put into scripts used in actual languages, but y'know, when they add emoji, at least people design glyphs for them pretty quickly. When they do the research to designate codepoints for Anatolian hieroglyphs, the codepoints just sit there unloved and unsupported.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
dschiptsov 10y ago
Ubuntu package?
- vixate 10y ago
  Ubuntu has a metapackage in the universe repository called "fonts-noto": http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts-noto http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts-noto Package: fonts-noto Repository: universe To install (if you have the universe repository enabled): sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install fonts-noto
c-smile 10y ago
[pedantic] "UTF-8 space"... UTF-8 code units space is quite limited by single byte - 0...255. You probably meant Unicode Code Points space that, at the moment, is 21-bits number: from 0 to 0x10FFFF (1,114,112 decimal) [/pedantic]
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  Not true at all. Per the wiki article[1], "UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, defined by Unicode" It's a variable-length encoding, and just so happens to correspond to ASCII for the first 127 characters. But if the leading bit of the byte is 1, it indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph. With the encoding, you can represent the entirety of the unicode space - The latter bytes start with 10 to indicate they're middle parts of the glyph, while the first byte uses 11 and continues to indicate how many bytes long the glpyh is. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
  - wolf550e 10y ago
    "code unit" is not "code point". "code unit" for utf-8 is 1 octet. "code unit" for utf-16 is a 16bit value. Both utf-8 and utf-16 can represent the entire space of unicode code points by using multiple code units to represent a single code point.
  - c-smile 10y ago
    Depends on what "space" means... As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit unicode code points. As of "... indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph." You are mixing completely different entities here. Unicode has nothing with glyphs. Glyph is an atomic component (image) of internal font structure. Single character (unicode code point here) can be composed on screen from multiple glyphs.
    - wolf550e 10y ago
      > As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit unicode code points. You're thinking of an older version of UTF-8 which allowed sequences of up to 6 bytes to be used to encode a single code point. UTF-8 is now defined to not allow code point values above 0x10FFFF and not allow code point values between 0xD800 to 0xDFFF (inclusive) to allow only the same values as possible in UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629
amyjess 10y ago
The sans has a real italic and not just an oblique. Color me impressed: real italics aren't very common in sanses, and that goes double for FOSS fonts. Very nice.
xbryanx 10y ago
This is really fantastic. It sent me looking for source materials for the character choices made for each language. I'm dealing with a media experience in Dakota and Ojibwa right now where we have source material that is spelled/character-ed quite differently than the alphabet provided by Noto in those languages. Given the scale of this project, I assume that some considerable thought went into each language's character set, but it's difficult to know for sure without any sourcing. The git commit logs don't offer up any hints. Anyone familiar with the project, know where I could find this sort of source information? Should I be referencing something in the Unicode definitions for these languages?
- iguessthislldo 10y ago
  I know basically nothing about Native American specific scripts, but if you do and they are not in Unicode (Right now they list Cherokee, Deseret, Osage, and Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics as their American Scripts) then check out their web site and try to see about having the relevant scripts/alphabet/letters, etc added to the standard.
- kens 10y ago
  The Noto characters are from the Unicode definitions, so that's where you should look to understand why those characters exist. These proposals provides some background: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf
tscs37 10y ago
Noto & Roboto are probably the two fonts I love more than anything now, I just find them so pleasing, they don't do anything stupid and they look good.
greggman 10y ago
I'm sure this will be perceived as too sensitive but who thought naming the missing character symbol as "tofu"? Tofu: a delicious super flexible food eaten by millions of asians Somehow that's being equated to a missing character that needs to be fixed with some solution Is Noto short for no-tofu? Way to give the middle finger to like 1 billion people's culture and cuisine
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I don't think it's meant as a derogative, but simply "the empty box symbol literally looks like tofu". An example of usage (from http://blog.tavultesoft.com/2015/01/keyman-pro-21-no-more-tofu.html http://blog.tavultesoft.com/2015/01/keyman-pro-21-no-more-to...) """ Among language computing professionals, these square boxes are commonly known as tofu – yes, those yummy squares of bean curd common in East Asian and South East Asian cuisine! """
  - greggman 10y ago
    It may not have been intended to be derogatory but that doesn't mean it hasn't ended up actually being derogatory. "No more tofu" certainly sounds like a judgement that "tofu" is bad/unwanted
    - zaroth 10y ago
      Homonyms are a thing. Of course a thing can also be good in one context and bad in another. No more tofu spilled in the bed. No more tofu spilled across my blog. "No more tofu" out of context sounds like a soy allergy. With context it means exactly what it says; eliminating a UX failure mode. If something can only be derogatory if you fundamentally change the actual meaning of the statement, I think it is proven the statement as-is is not in fact derogatory. I would go so far as to say, it's abusing the notion and nature of human language to claim otherwise.
- SimonPStevens 10y ago
  I've always assumed it's just because tofu comes in square blocks, and the character looks a bit like it.
sushid 10y ago
Surprised to see that Google is supporting even archaic Korean [0], but it would have been nice to see a chunk of text in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, as opposed to a bunch of gibberish in all three languages. [0] https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-kore https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-kore
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  They even support Linear B, which fell in disuse more than 3000 years ago with the Bronze Age Collapse of the Mycenaean civilization: https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-linb https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-linb
samfisher83 10y ago
Is Google using aws to host this. If you look at: https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/ https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/ You will see the following: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <ListBucketResult xmlns='http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'> http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'> <Name>noto-website</Name> <Prefix></Prefix> <Marker></Marker> <NextMarker>emoji/emoji_u1f468_200d_1f468_200d_1f466_200d_1f466.png</NextMarker> <IsTruncated>true</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>css/emoji-zsye-color.css</Key> <Generation>1464738619772000</Generation> <MetaGeneration>1</MetaGeneration> <LastModified>2016-05-31T23:50:19.729Z</LastModified> <ETag>"e3aaae52d88ced070044f59d1efe2009"</ETag> <Size>152</Size> <Owner/> </Contents> http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png Are they using Amazon S3? Edit: They just changed it. @1:00 pm so it no longer mentions aws.
- keketi 10y ago
  The host could be implementing an S3 compatible API.
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  If you do the DNS traces, it's easy to see: No. They're just implementing a S3 compatible API. ;; ANSWER SECTION: noto-website.storage.googleapis.com. 3174 IN CNAME storage.l.googleusercontent.com. storage.l.googleusercontent.com. 300 IN A 172.217.5.112 ;; ANSWER SECTION: 112.5.217.172.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR sfo03s07-in-f16.1e100.net. 112.5.217.172.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR sfo03s07-in-f16.1e100.net.
- eva1984 10y ago
  Just schema
- BrandonY 10y ago
  Good question. I can explain. "storage.googleapis.com" is an endpoint for Google Cloud Storage's "XML" API. Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a cloud blob storage service similar to Amazon S3. This particular API, the "XML" API, is designed to be API-compatible with S3. The XML namespace, 'http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01' http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01', is therefore the same. This allows third party tools like 'boto' and the like which work with S3 to work with GCS with only a switch in hostname.
niels_olson 10y ago
reminds me of natto. Gross. edit: why the downvotes? They bring up tofu and then name the cure something close to natto, cured soy beans. And by cured, I mean fermented. And by fermented, I mean stringy at the molecular level, smells and tastes awful. And when I say awful, I mean, most of the people from the originating culture think it's awful.
quirkot 10y ago
To see all of the characters that are on the internet, you will need to download a CD's worth of fonts, 473mb. #MindBlown
ww520 10y ago
The font support spans so many languages. This is incredible. Font work is hard and tedious, and thankless. Kudos to Google for open sourcing it.
Dowwie 10y ago
What are hints and why are the noto fonts packages according to hinted and unhinted? I'm not sure which package to use for linux.
- kps 10y ago
  > What are hints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting > I'm not sure which package to use for linux. Ooh, yummy canned worms.
- lottin 10y ago
  You need the hinted version if your freetype does hinting, whereas if it does autohinting (or no hinting at all) you don't need hints, as in this case hints are ignored. So if in doubt install the hinted fonts.
ythl 10y ago
Wow, they implemented Deseret - the Mormon-invented phonetic alphabet
- karlshea 10y ago
  And Klingon
  - Sniffnoy 10y ago
    ? Klingon isn't in Unicode...
    - karlshea 10y ago
      It technically isn't, but it's listed in a private-use area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets And, if you check the languages for the full Noto font Klingon is listed so it should work.
      - Sniffnoy 10y ago
        Huh, I didn't know about that. Interesting!
- vacri 10y ago
  And Glagolitic, an alphabet I'd never heard of before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet
xendo 10y ago
I wonder why they didn't share the fact that it was created using AI.
binthere 10y ago
So, did they actually handcrafted each of the 100k+ characters? Probably not, but if yes, then I call it BS.
ppierald 10y ago
I always thought the term Tofu was "mojibake": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake Wikipedia disambiguation page: for "Tofu" mentions: Slang for the empty boxes shown in place of undisplayable code points in computer character encoding, a form of mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation)
- derefr 10y ago
  Mojibake is specifically the "garbage" from getting an encoding wrong—treating a sequence of bits as if they were a valid sequence of characters in some encoding, when they're either not from that encoding, or not from any textual encoding (because you're e.g. trying to render the contents of an executable binary as text.) "Tofu" is a more recent phenomena, that didn't really have a specific name until now: when there are Unicode code-points—correctly decoded—in a document, but you have no font installed that offers a glyph to represent them. Mojibake results from "I did this wrong and didn't notice"; tofu results from "I know what this is, and it's something I don't have a visual signifier for." Mind you, often mojibake will result in "tofu"; the garbage code-points you get from bad encoding detection will turn out to be ones that don't have a currently-defined Unicode character, so they'll show up as U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (�). But that's a coincidence, rather than an equivalence.
  - ppierald 10y ago
    Thanks! That was a super helpful response!
threepipeproblm 10y ago
This would be better if it were called Nofu...
wkoszek 10y ago
Wondering if Matthew Butterick will like those. Will keep looking at Practical Typography for updates.
- khaled 10y ago
  Matthew Butterick just hates anything related to Google since they started Google Fonts, don’t hold your breath.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
erichocean 10y ago
> The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu”. Nofu would have been a better name if that's actually the goal.
dvcrn 10y ago
Is it possible to replace the Mac system font for some languages with this? I prefer the Noto Japanese typeface over the one that comes with Mac and would like to replace it.
- scott_karana 10y ago
  Possibly. Various "Helvetica to Lucida" scripts and tools came out when the default font was switched in Mavericks or Yosemite. Worth trying!
- Razengan 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you can replace system-wide fonts without some hacks, like [1], but maybe TinkerTool [2][3] can help a bit: [1] http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font-mac-os-x-el-capitan-lucida-grande/ http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font-ma... [2] https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html [3] http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png
sebastianconcpt 10y ago
Awesome. It took us only ~7 decades of Computing to invent this :)
ThatMightBePaul 10y ago
I wanted to try the Noto mono out for programming, but it looks like the `O` is indistinguishable from the `0` :/ Otherwise, it's a nice looking font for the editor.
- unlogic 10y ago
  I've just tried it, and it is absolutely the same as Droid Sans Mono (which I love and use), barring the extra line spacing. They haven't even fixed the kerning problem with "w".
- blockoperation 10y ago
  The lack of a dotted or slashed '0' is infuriating for me, especially considering that Droid Sans Mono has variants for both.
jyrkesh 10y ago
Has anyone managed to install the Color Emoji font on Windows? Getting something about it not being a valid font file
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  I am getting similar errors on Mac OS 10.11. Looks like something may be messed up with that one.
jxy 10y ago
APL is finally gonna take the world. Thanks to google. Wait, does it have APL symbols?
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  "The Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane includes the APL symbols in the Miscellaneous Technical block, which are therefore usually rendered accurately from the larger Unicode fonts installed with most modern operating systems."
soheil 10y ago
There is Old Persian but not Persian?
- khaled 10y ago
  Persian is written in the Arabic script. If you search for Persian it will give you Noto Arabic fonts.
amake 10y ago
The claim of full coverage of 110,000+ characters (they are targeting Unicode 6, apparently) appears to be false: Noto Sans CJK covers approximately 30K characters[1], while as of Unicode 6.0 there were 74,614 CJK Unified Ideographs (calculated from [2]). Edit: Using a script I made to check codepoint coverage[3] I get 63,639 codepoints with glyphs defined for all Noto fonts included in their default download (Noto-unhinted.zip). [1] https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/717#issuecomment-228440822 https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/717#issuecom... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs [3] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f43093b7809a5d54d/raw/b6d93e14cbe7dadaf9aa744fc65fd31045c380d2/list_ttf_chars.py https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f430...
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  Did you compare it with other fonts listed on [1] like GNU Unifont, Code2000 and Arial Unicode MS? The table of that article is missing many useful columns. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces
MNukazawa 10y ago
I seem to intend to destroy it seriously. http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US.html?tofu=false http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US...
forkandgrok 10y ago
Last time I checked, Noto Mono was not considered a monospace font by Windows' console (Command Prompt) and cannot be used for working in the console (including Bash on Ubuntu on Windows). Is that still the case?
bkhurjawal 10y ago
Robot's won't take over the world! Google will.
petecox 10y ago
Hey google team, Windows 10 reported an error: "NotoColorEmoji.ttf is not a valid font file".
chuckreynolds 10y ago
How come I get "6 serious errors were found. Do not use these fonts." in macOS Font Book? v10.11.6
mathiasrw 10y ago
How to make a quick logo? Just write the name of the company and use the https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-bugi https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-bugi font...
- tomtomtom777 10y ago
  Luckily, the era where a different alphabet could be rendered by using a special font while using the exact same codepoints as Latin is behind us. With Unicode, different alphabets use different codepoints and your trick won't work. (unless of course it's a Buginese company)
imeron 10y ago
I wish they would just support Latin Extended in Google Docs when Google Fonts are selected.
jug 10y ago
Why follow up Roboto? An honest question, not a rhetorical one. I don't yet prefer any one over the other. I understand it covers a large part of Unicode, but if that is what makes it unique, couldn't Roboto just be extended?
wst_ 10y ago
Looking at any fonts, recently, I am starting to crave for a 4K LCD panel. When people were switching to HD panels there were big WOW around, but after buying a smartphone, I realized that HD is good for smartphone, but not enough for anything big. I love to read on my smartphone and I love to code, too, but fonts look just crappy (especially on Windows). Sadly, good 4K panels out there are still quite pricey.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  This is why i still use xterm with the default bitmap font in xterm. 10pt vector fonts on <100dpi screens look just awful.
blunte 10y ago
No slash through the monospace zero. What a huge shame.
stevejohnson 10y ago
This would make an excellent character set for a roguelike.

1217 points by bpierre 10y ago

Related blog post here: https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-font-system-for-everyone.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-fon...

Splendor 10y ago
> "Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters." Wow. That's a lot of work.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Indeed but worth it if you are Google though.
  - vnglst 10y ago
    How is this worth it for Google? Honest question, always wondered what Google gets out Google Fonts.
    - duskwuff 10y ago
      Most of the fonts on Google Fonts are not, in fact, authored by Google. They're just distributing them, which is relatively cheap. The Noto family is an exception.
    - WA 10y ago
      Traffic insights for websites that don't use Google Analytics.
      - Klathmon 10y ago
        Per their Fonts API ToS they don't track anything except total aggregate usage per font.
      - jeremy_wiebe 10y ago
        That only works if you use Google's hosted fonts though, right?
        Sylos 10y ago
        Yeah, but that's still plenty of webpages.
      - jrockway 10y ago
        Except the fonts are cacheable for a year, so you won't be pinging Google on every site that uses Google Fonts. It wouldn't be a very good tracking mechanism, if that's what it were intended for.
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
      Well, they can track people across sites that use Google Fonts, so maybe having a larger set of characters and encouraging more use gives them a farther tracking reach.
      - kps 10y ago
        https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...
        lallysingh 10y ago
        For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users? The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently. Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail. In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers.
        pflats 10y ago
        Google also said that their new messaging app would be end-to-end encrypted by default, and then quickly changed their mind when business reasons prevailed. Business reasons will always prevail. But even beyond that: >For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail. That's not what the snippet says. It is a technical statement, not a privacy statement. It doesn't mean they can't track you, it means it's a tiny bit harder to track you. Nothing in there says "we don't cross-reference these data" or "these data aren't used for tracking purposes" or anything else. Just that your Google account information isn't sent to the font servers. More relevantly, the Google Fonts privacy policy links to the general Google privacy policy, which doesn't have any special "if you're using Google Fonts we collect a whole lot less than this" subsection. They might be using the data. They might not be. They might not be using the data today but decide to start using it tomorrow.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > How is this worth it for Google? Text is more easily consumed by Google services (Search, Now, etc.) than, e.g., graphical representations, and information is more likely to be stored in text if there are fonts that support presenting the information people want to communicate. Having a font family covering all world languages (and covering the full gamut of Unicode characters) increases the scope of information that can be effectively communicated via text.
    - pmyjavec 10y ago
      Tracking
    - mrb 10y ago
      Google has a deceptively simple incentive to make everything better: better fonts, better browsers, better phones, etc, all this drives increased web adoption, hence increased advertising revenues. PS: I love Noto specifically for its Unicode support. I use it on my blog. It's also the default "serif" font on Chrome for Android (but not Chrome for Linux).
      - dalke 10y ago
        "everything", except where it doesn't. Its Usenet archives suffered from bitrot. Its RSS reader is no more.
        packetslave 10y ago
        Oh, honestly. Yes, Google shut down Reader 3 years ago after providing it for free for 8 years. Get over it and move on with your life already.
        dalke 10y ago
        Why are you so abusive towards me when you agree with me? I'm not knocking them for stopping support for things they don't find sufficiently monetizeable. I disagreed with the statement "Google has a deceptively simple incentive to make everything better", and gave counter-examples. Append something like "... where it helps drive profit", then I've no complaint.
        mrb 10y ago
        Well Google has an incentive to make everything better, but they can't literally work on everything, so they have to pick and choose. For example Google has repeatedly explained Reader was killed because "usage has declined"¹ So this validates my point: they put resources in developing a product, but it doesn't get enough traction, so they kill it and redirect their resources to other projects that will hopefully be more successful and provide more users and ad revenues to Google. ¹ http://googlereader.blogspot.ca/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html http://googlereader.blogspot.ca/2013/03/powering-down-google...
    - skybrian 10y ago
      Although it's not always perfect, Google takes internationalization seriously. Its websites are used all over the world. Having a nice font that supports every language simplifies things.
      - jfim 10y ago
        They don't. I18n on Android is seriously awful. For example, Android 5 shipped with an improperly escaped string in the French Canadian localization strings that would cause the phone to reboot in a loop if it was connected to a charger when opening the lockscreen. Even the latest Android version (Nougat) displays the battery as "24 % %" in the French localization, "Press power button twice for camera" has been translated to the near unreadable "App. 2x sur interr. pr activ. app. photo" (roughly "Prs pwr btn 2x fr cam.") and some of the localized strings are comically nonsensical.
        Godel_unicode 10y ago
        "Takes seriously" is orthogonal to "is great at". There are also non-i18n problems in Android which lead to reboots. If you expect the UI to be perfect in every language all the time, consider what you're actually asking.
    - jpatokal 10y ago
      Aside from the obvious benefit to having a Web that's less broken for everybody, one of my previous projects at Google was implementing support for multiple scripts in a mapping product. I literally don't know how I could have pulled this off without Noto: all other alternatives would have involved some combination of subpar quality, incomplete coverage, incompatible appearance or near-impossible license requirements. (Standard disclaimer: I work at Google, but these views are my own, not Google's.)
    - zackelan 10y ago
      > How is this worth it for Google? Anytime you find yourself asking "why is big company X giving away Y for free?" the answer is usually that they're commoditizing their complements: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html Virtually everything Google gives away for free follows this pattern.
    - pmmeyourndas 10y ago
      Well people keep saying they're interested in a better web. What they get out of it is data. If you include Google fonts they can track your users.
- wibr 10y ago
  110,000 characters is not every symbol in the Unicode standard, though. According to wikipedia Unicode 9.0 contains around 128,000.
  - bonoboTP 10y ago
    Yep, Old Hungarian is still not there, nor anywhere else except for fonts that were specifically designed just for Old Hungarian. I was happy when the script got included in Unicode 8.0 but if fonts don't support it, it's not much use.
  - talideon 10y ago
    It's bloody close though, and no doubt at least a useful chunk of that will eventually be filled out.
piquadrat 10y ago
> When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge. That right there is probably the most important ingredient of many moonshot projects.
saadat 10y ago
Monotype has published a case study too: http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800-languages-in-a-single-typeface-creating-noto-for-google/ http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800...

eganist 10y ago

So in a nutshell, typefaces which literally span every single defined character? Are there special optimizations implemented for different use cases as well, e.g. screen v. print and sub-varieties of each? Ten years ago with Vista, Microsoft Typography (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Typography/default.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Typography/default.aspx) put out a family of typefaces--Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, etc.--which were optimized specifically for sub-pixel rendering on LCD screens while maintaining on-paper legibility. I'd be cool with Noto not having any such optimization in mind given that the stated objective appears to be to include every defined character, but I do wonder if it should happen eventually. ...or maybe not, who knows. Pixel densities now have approached ludicrous territories. It might just no longer matter at least when we're talking about optimizing for screens.

the_unknown 10y ago
At the time I wrote to one of the team members who worked there (maybe a Program Manager - I forget exactly) and they sent me a beautiful book showing off each of the fonts with a description of why the font was made, how it achieves the goals, and some info on the font's designer. I still have it at home - really impressed me with the attention to detail and the self-styled publicity.
- Adrock 10y ago
  It was called _Now Read This_ and it really is beautiful. As far as I know, it was not intended to be publicly available, but you can buy a copy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft-Collection/dp/B00NRKCS8C https://www.amazon.com/Now-Read-This-Microsoft-Collection/dp...
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock. Correction, you could buy a copy on Amazon... Own up! Who got the last one?!
amelius 10y ago

dorianm 10y ago

It was released originally in 2013: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts Such an amazing project

LeoPanthera 10y ago
I wish Wikipedia redirected m. links to the desktop site if you aren't using a mobile browser.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Maybe it would make sense, but I personally prefer their mobile site. It's much nicer to read. Not that their desktop site is filled with ads and gibberish, but for whatever reason I like it more.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  local userscript workaround: https://gist.github.com/jspenguin/11295206 https://gist.github.com/jspenguin/11295206

tcfunk 10y ago

I keep wanting to find a font to use on the portions of my website that contain Japanese, but they are all so big! No way I'm making my visitors download 115MB worth of font just so it looks a little nicer. Edit: Thanks for the tips, I will look into those options :)

onedognight 10y ago
What you want is a font subset and google even provides[0] an API to get one. [0] http://thenewcode.com/878/Slash-Page-Load-Times-With-CSS-Font-Subsetting http://thenewcode.com/878/Slash-Page-Load-Times-With-CSS-Fon...
sirn 10y ago
The solution (more of a workaround) to this is to cut the font to just JIS X 0208 (containing Kanji level 1 and 2, total of 6,879 characters) or JIS X 0213 subset (containing Kanji level 1-4, total of 11,233 characters). It should cut the character count to the most commonly used ones, which should reduce file size by a lot (or skip JIS X and select only glyph for Kanji level 1 to reduce it even further). There is a Subset Maker Tool[1] (in Japanese) that can do this. But you need to provide the list of characters you want to keep by yourself (searching for JIS第1第2水準漢字 usually helps). If you do not want to do this by yourself, Google also provide a version of Noto Sans that has been stripped down to just JIS X 0208 subset in their Early Access program[1]. [1]: http://opentype.jp/subsetfontmk.htm http://opentype.jp/subsetfontmk.htm [2]: https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+Japanese https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+Japanese
mutagen 10y ago
Google's Noto Sans CJK JP contains 9 font files, each about 13MB. You can edit fonts to subset glyphs or glyph sets you expect to use to further reduce the file size, although I suspect the CJK languages are never going to be as easy to get to fast web speeds. The JIS X 0208 subset still weighs in at almost 4 MB for a single OTF.
acdha 10y ago
Since you mentioned that your entire site isn't in Japanese, in addition to what other people specified, I would now recommend using the CSS unicode-range selector. That allows you to list a web font declaration with a range of Unicode code points and most modern browsers now implement the optimization where it only downloads the font when text on the page contains a character in that range. I tossed together an example several years ago: http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal-noto-sans/ http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni... The combined example on http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/universal-noto-sans/single-name.html http://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/webfonts/uni... has CSS which looks like this: @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSans"), local("Noto Sans"), url(NotoSans-Regular.woff) format("woff"); } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansArmenian"), local("Noto Sans Armenian"), url(NotoSansArmenian-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+530-58F, U+FB13-FB17; } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansBengali"), local("Noto Sans Bengali"), url(NotoSansBengali-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+AD, U+D7, U+F7, U+964-965, U+981-983, U+985-98C, U+98F-990, U+993-9A8, U+9AA-9B0, U+9B2, U+9B6-9B9, U+9BC-9C4, U+9C7-9C8, U+9CB-9CE, U+9D7, U+9DC-9DD, U+9DF-9E3, U+9E6-9FB, U+200B-200D, U+2013-2014, U+2018-2019, U+201C-201D, U+2026, U+20B9, U+2212, U+25CC; } @font-face { font-family: NotoSansCombined; src: local("NotoSansCherokee"), local("Noto Sans Cherokee"), url(NotoSansCherokee-Regular.woff) format("woff"); unicode-range: U+13A0-13F4; } In modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari you can see that only downloads a few of the many language files available. This also works really nicely with the traditional CSS font stacks if your design goals allow you to specify system fonts which will work for many users so you can have a few local fonts specified before the downloadable one.

capex 10y ago

Refreshing to see the lorem ipsum replaced with something meaningful.

jagger27 10y ago
It's better than the quick brown fox too.
- soperj 10y ago
  not really. It's longer and it misses the letters j,k,v,x, and z. That's almost 20% of the alphabet.
  - adevine 10y ago
    When you select a different language from the search box, though, you see those same sentences translated into the other languages. Wouldn't be possible to get full alphabet coverage in all translation/alphabet combinations.

pat2man 10y ago

Any idea why they don't just merge Roboto and Noto?

Alex3917 10y ago
I don't have any inside information, but it seems like they have different goals. Roboto is primarily designed to evoke certain emotions and to display well across devices, whereas Noto is primarily designed to render consistently across languages.

aluminussoma 10y ago

Noto fonts are great. I especially love the OFL licensing. I wanted to include fonts in a mobile application and there was confusion on whether including a GPL version of the fonts would force me to GPL my app - something I could not do. I couldn't find a definite answer. With Noto's OFL licensing, I no longer had that worry.

eveningcoffee 10y ago
I think that you are looking to the GPL from the wrong perspective. I also made this mistake. GPL does not force you to licence your application under GPL. Instead licensing your application under GPL allows you to use other GPL licensed code.
- zanny 10y ago
  You don't have to use the GPL to link GPL code. You are just required to distribute the final binary under GPL. When you distribute the source files, individual files can be under individual licenses, they just have to all be license compatible with the final license. IE, use GPL code, license header all your own stuff as Apache, distribute the binary as GPL, but anyone else can use your own work under Apache if they want if you are individually licensing all your own files under it, they just could not use the GPL parts without also distributing under GPL.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    Do you know a project where such licensing scheme is used as an acceptable practice? As to be honest, it looks counter productive against GPL ideas.
    - halomru 10y ago
      In my eyes that practise would be equivalent with dual-licensing your code under GPL and the (more liberal) license of your choice. This happens with some frequency. It's a way to honor the GPL idea for the stuff you link to without having to follow GPL ideas for your new code.

memetomancer 10y ago

I'm not installing 500 MB of fonts without a flipping contact sheet on the page :(

amyjess 10y ago
You mean a specimen page? I couldn't find one linked from the article, but I found this while Googling: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans
- memetomancer 10y ago
  thanks, i did mean specimen page, mea culpa. also thx for the link!

ixtli 10y ago

I don't think this communicates the _incredible_ amount of creative and technical work required not only to simply fill out over 100,000 characters in the UTF-8 space but to make them stylistically consistent.

nkoren 10y ago
Work, shmurk! Their set of Akkadian glyphs set looks incomplete, and they don't even have Sumerian or Rongorongo. These guys need to stop sleeping on the job! </sarcasm> (Obviously I'm awed...)
- lisper 10y ago
  Just FYI, this is not sarcasm, it's ironic humor. Not the same thing. Sarcasm is "the use of irony to mock or convey contempt" which is obviously not what you meant.
  - dalke 10y ago
    Also, Rongorongo isn't yet in the Unicode standard. Can't fault a Unicode font for not supporting something which isn't there.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    What % of people do you estimate would make that distinction?
    - lisper 10y ago
      Call me old fashioned, but I think it's important to know what words actually mean, and to use the words that mean what you actually intend to convey. To quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." (If you're not familiar with that quote, it worth looking it up and reading it in context.)

eveningcoffee 10y ago

Please do not use these fonts directly from Google servers. This is an another attribute for Google to track the whole browsing traffic. This is too much power for one company.

awesomerobot 10y ago
Use them or not, just be aware that Google is tracking them.
kauegimenes 10y ago
Its a .zip...
- Sylos 10y ago
  He's referring to including Google Fonts as font-face into your webpage, so that they are downloaded by each client from Google's server.
sinatra 10y ago
On the other hand, letting Google host the fonts will allow your users to use the cached font without needing to waste bandwidth and time unnecessarily. Especially if you already use Google Analytics, I'll say, please let Google host the fonts too.
Klathmon 10y ago
Google's ToS state that they will not track them beyond simple aggregate numbers of downloads per [time], which they release in their analytics dashboard publicly. Not only that but the cache headers are set to 1 year... That's a pretty shitty tracking system if I've ever seen one.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  ToS are known to change in time. Are you suggesting that if millions of websites use this font then it will be removed when Google changes its ToS?

WallowC_33 10y ago

No slashed-zero (or even center dotted) in the monospace version. smh

fazlerocks 10y ago

We had to stop using this font as it didn't support back tick(`). Try typing ` multiple times in the search box. We had reported this to Google some months back but got no response.

bumblebeard 10y ago
Nothing looks wrong to me (Firefox/Debian). Are you sure it's a problem with the font?
icebraining 10y ago
I don't get it, what's the problem?
- taco_emoji 10y ago
  Here's a link to the issue on Github: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/736 https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/736
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tux1968 10y ago
Don't know what the problem looked like on your system, but there was no apparent problem here on Firefox/Linux.
- amyjess 10y ago
  Chromium/Linux here, I can replicate it on the specimen page. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans Under the 'Styles' section, type: `foo` You'll see the first ` overlap the f. Now erase it all and type: ```` They all overlap each other and show up as just one `. Edit: from what it looks like, the problem is specific to the sans. I can't replicate it with the serif (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Serif if anyone wants to try).

tobltobs 10y ago

That is great. I am working on a project where I require a font which includes all (or at leas as much as possible) unicode symbols. Until now I was thankful that I could use GNU unifont as a fallback, even if it was ugly. But this will make my app look so much better.

stesch 10y ago

Fun fact: People behind a WatchGuard firewall (default settings) won't see Google fonts (at least in Firefox) because the firewall filters the CORS headers.

ademarre 10y ago
What an awful overreach. Firewalls should not ship with defaults that break the internet, and such presumptuous header filtering can actually weaken security.
- stesch 10y ago
  Filtering X-Frame-Options is bad for security. Filtering anti CSRF headers like in Drupal and ShopWare is bad for security. But this seems to be the current reality with enterprise firewalls. :-( (No, TLS doesn't help in the long run. If your boss wants to know which pages you are reading he will let the experts setup this: https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squid https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squi...)
  - ademarre 10y ago
    Or this WatchGuard HTTPS proxy config: http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en-us/content/en-us/certificates/cert_https_proxy_resign_c.html http://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/wsm/xtm_11/en-us/content...
    - stesch 10y ago
      Nice. I'm just the victim. Whenever I suspect the firewall to be the cause of a problem I use a proxy via a ssh tunnel. As long as it's not forbidden for me to actually solve problems. The list of software that isn't usable behind a WatchGuard firewall (and maybe similar enterprise firewalls) is getting longer and longer. No Google fonts, no Drupal, no ShopWare 5.2, JIRA barely usable, etc.
      - 10y ago

kccqzy 10y ago

It doesn't seem to support the Tangut script, which is added in Unicode 9.0. It's the first thing I test if a font claims to support all languages in Unicode. In my knowledge, I haven't really seen any general-purpose fonts containing support for Tangut (because probably no one is going to use it). I thought Google has already completed this project, but apparently they haven't yet.

Mathnerd314 10y ago
They've completed it up to Unicode 6.0 (released in 2010). Are there any Unicode fonts at all for Tangut? I looked but didn't find any.
- rspeer 10y ago
  Probably not -- unless you count the proprietary, obfuscated font they use to make the official Unicode charts. Some people snark at Unicode for putting so much more effort into emoji recently than they put into scripts used in actual languages, but y'know, when they add emoji, at least people design glyphs for them pretty quickly. When they do the research to designate codepoints for Anatolian hieroglyphs, the codepoints just sit there unloved and unsupported.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

dschiptsov 10y ago

Ubuntu package?

vixate 10y ago
Ubuntu has a metapackage in the universe repository called "fonts-noto": http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts-noto http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts-noto Package: fonts-noto Repository: universe To install (if you have the universe repository enabled): sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install fonts-noto

c-smile 10y ago

[pedantic] "UTF-8 space"... UTF-8 code units space is quite limited by single byte - 0...255. You probably meant Unicode Code Points space that, at the moment, is 21-bits number: from 0 to 0x10FFFF (1,114,112 decimal) [/pedantic]

GauntletWizard 10y ago
Not true at all. Per the wiki article[1], "UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, defined by Unicode" It's a variable-length encoding, and just so happens to correspond to ASCII for the first 127 characters. But if the leading bit of the byte is 1, it indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph. With the encoding, you can represent the entirety of the unicode space - The latter bytes start with 10 to indicate they're middle parts of the glyph, while the first byte uses 11 and continues to indicate how many bytes long the glpyh is. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
- wolf550e 10y ago
  "code unit" is not "code point". "code unit" for utf-8 is 1 octet. "code unit" for utf-16 is a 16bit value. Both utf-8 and utf-16 can represent the entire space of unicode code points by using multiple code units to represent a single code point.
- c-smile 10y ago
  Depends on what "space" means... As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit unicode code points. As of "... indicates that it's part of a multi-byte glyph." You are mixing completely different entities here. Unicode has nothing with glyphs. Glyph is an atomic component (image) of internal font structure. Single character (unicode code point here) can be composed on screen from multiple glyphs.
  - wolf550e 10y ago
    > As of utf-8 encoding... It is a variable encoding that is capable to encode any 32-bit number: from 0 to 0xFFFFFFFF. Not just current set of 21-bit unicode code points. You're thinking of an older version of UTF-8 which allowed sequences of up to 6 bytes to be used to encode a single code point. UTF-8 is now defined to not allow code point values above 0x10FFFF and not allow code point values between 0xD800 to 0xDFFF (inclusive) to allow only the same values as possible in UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Invalid_byte_sequences https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629

amyjess 10y ago

The sans has a real italic and not just an oblique. Color me impressed: real italics aren't very common in sanses, and that goes double for FOSS fonts. Very nice.

xbryanx 10y ago

This is really fantastic. It sent me looking for source materials for the character choices made for each language. I'm dealing with a media experience in Dakota and Ojibwa right now where we have source material that is spelled/character-ed quite differently than the alphabet provided by Noto in those languages. Given the scale of this project, I assume that some considerable thought went into each language's character set, but it's difficult to know for sure without any sourcing. The git commit logs don't offer up any hints. Anyone familiar with the project, know where I could find this sort of source information? Should I be referencing something in the Unicode definitions for these languages?

iguessthislldo 10y ago
I know basically nothing about Native American specific scripts, but if you do and they are not in Unicode (Right now they list Cherokee, Deseret, Osage, and Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics as their American Scripts) then check out their web site and try to see about having the relevant scripts/alphabet/letters, etc added to the standard.
kens 10y ago
The Noto characters are from the Unicode definitions, so that's where you should look to understand why those characters exist. These proposals provides some background: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08132r-n3427r-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08342-n3507-syllabics.pdf

tscs37 10y ago

Noto & Roboto are probably the two fonts I love more than anything now, I just find them so pleasing, they don't do anything stupid and they look good.

greggman 10y ago

I'm sure this will be perceived as too sensitive but who thought naming the missing character symbol as "tofu"? Tofu: a delicious super flexible food eaten by millions of asians Somehow that's being equated to a missing character that needs to be fixed with some solution Is Noto short for no-tofu? Way to give the middle finger to like 1 billion people's culture and cuisine

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I don't think it's meant as a derogative, but simply "the empty box symbol literally looks like tofu". An example of usage (from http://blog.tavultesoft.com/2015/01/keyman-pro-21-no-more-tofu.html http://blog.tavultesoft.com/2015/01/keyman-pro-21-no-more-to...) """ Among language computing professionals, these square boxes are commonly known as tofu – yes, those yummy squares of bean curd common in East Asian and South East Asian cuisine! """
- greggman 10y ago
  It may not have been intended to be derogatory but that doesn't mean it hasn't ended up actually being derogatory. "No more tofu" certainly sounds like a judgement that "tofu" is bad/unwanted
  - zaroth 10y ago
    Homonyms are a thing. Of course a thing can also be good in one context and bad in another. No more tofu spilled in the bed. No more tofu spilled across my blog. "No more tofu" out of context sounds like a soy allergy. With context it means exactly what it says; eliminating a UX failure mode. If something can only be derogatory if you fundamentally change the actual meaning of the statement, I think it is proven the statement as-is is not in fact derogatory. I would go so far as to say, it's abusing the notion and nature of human language to claim otherwise.
SimonPStevens 10y ago
I've always assumed it's just because tofu comes in square blocks, and the character looks a bit like it.

sushid 10y ago

Surprised to see that Google is supporting even archaic Korean [0], but it would have been nice to see a chunk of text in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, as opposed to a bunch of gibberish in all three languages. [0] https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-kore https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-kore

JorgeGT 10y ago
They even support Linear B, which fell in disuse more than 3000 years ago with the Bronze Age Collapse of the Mycenaean civilization: https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-linb https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-linb

samfisher83 10y ago

Is Google using aws to host this. If you look at: https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/ https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/ You will see the following: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <ListBucketResult xmlns='http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'> http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01'> <Name>noto-website</Name> <Prefix></Prefix> <Marker></Marker> <NextMarker>emoji/emoji_u1f468_200d_1f468_200d_1f466_200d_1f466.png</NextMarker> <IsTruncated>true</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>css/emoji-zsye-color.css</Key> <Generation>1464738619772000</Generation> <MetaGeneration>1</MetaGeneration> <LastModified>2016-05-31T23:50:19.729Z</LastModified> <ETag>"e3aaae52d88ced070044f59d1efe2009"</ETag> <Size>152</Size> <Owner/> </Contents> http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png http://i.imgur.com/yLiWUGq.png Are they using Amazon S3? Edit: They just changed it. @1:00 pm so it no longer mentions aws.

keketi 10y ago
The host could be implementing an S3 compatible API.
GauntletWizard 10y ago
If you do the DNS traces, it's easy to see: No. They're just implementing a S3 compatible API. ;; ANSWER SECTION: noto-website.storage.googleapis.com. 3174 IN CNAME storage.l.googleusercontent.com. storage.l.googleusercontent.com. 300 IN A 172.217.5.112 ;; ANSWER SECTION: 112.5.217.172.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR sfo03s07-in-f16.1e100.net. 112.5.217.172.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR sfo03s07-in-f16.1e100.net.
eva1984 10y ago
Just schema
BrandonY 10y ago
Good question. I can explain. "storage.googleapis.com" is an endpoint for Google Cloud Storage's "XML" API. Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a cloud blob storage service similar to Amazon S3. This particular API, the "XML" API, is designed to be API-compatible with S3. The XML namespace, 'http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01' http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01', is therefore the same. This allows third party tools like 'boto' and the like which work with S3 to work with GCS with only a switch in hostname.

niels_olson 10y ago

reminds me of natto. Gross. edit: why the downvotes? They bring up tofu and then name the cure something close to natto, cured soy beans. And by cured, I mean fermented. And by fermented, I mean stringy at the molecular level, smells and tastes awful. And when I say awful, I mean, most of the people from the originating culture think it's awful.

quirkot 10y ago

To see all of the characters that are on the internet, you will need to download a CD's worth of fonts, 473mb. #MindBlown

ww520 10y ago

The font support spans so many languages. This is incredible. Font work is hard and tedious, and thankless. Kudos to Google for open sourcing it.

Dowwie 10y ago

What are hints and why are the noto fonts packages according to hinted and unhinted? I'm not sure which package to use for linux.

kps 10y ago
> What are hints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting > I'm not sure which package to use for linux. Ooh, yummy canned worms.
lottin 10y ago
You need the hinted version if your freetype does hinting, whereas if it does autohinting (or no hinting at all) you don't need hints, as in this case hints are ignored. So if in doubt install the hinted fonts.

ythl 10y ago

Wow, they implemented Deseret - the Mormon-invented phonetic alphabet

karlshea 10y ago
And Klingon
- Sniffnoy 10y ago
  ? Klingon isn't in Unicode...
  - karlshea 10y ago
    It technically isn't, but it's listed in a private-use area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_alphabets And, if you check the languages for the full Noto font Klingon is listed so it should work.
    - Sniffnoy 10y ago
      Huh, I didn't know about that. Interesting!
vacri 10y ago
And Glagolitic, an alphabet I'd never heard of before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet

xendo 10y ago

I wonder why they didn't share the fact that it was created using AI.

binthere 10y ago

So, did they actually handcrafted each of the 100k+ characters? Probably not, but if yes, then I call it BS.

ppierald 10y ago

I always thought the term Tofu was "mojibake": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake Wikipedia disambiguation page: for "Tofu" mentions: Slang for the empty boxes shown in place of undisplayable code points in computer character encoding, a form of mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation)

derefr 10y ago
Mojibake is specifically the "garbage" from getting an encoding wrong—treating a sequence of bits as if they were a valid sequence of characters in some encoding, when they're either not from that encoding, or not from any textual encoding (because you're e.g. trying to render the contents of an executable binary as text.) "Tofu" is a more recent phenomena, that didn't really have a specific name until now: when there are Unicode code-points—correctly decoded—in a document, but you have no font installed that offers a glyph to represent them. Mojibake results from "I did this wrong and didn't notice"; tofu results from "I know what this is, and it's something I don't have a visual signifier for." Mind you, often mojibake will result in "tofu"; the garbage code-points you get from bad encoding detection will turn out to be ones that don't have a currently-defined Unicode character, so they'll show up as U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (�). But that's a coincidence, rather than an equivalence.
- ppierald 10y ago
  Thanks! That was a super helpful response!

threepipeproblm 10y ago

This would be better if it were called Nofu...

wkoszek 10y ago

Wondering if Matthew Butterick will like those. Will keep looking at Practical Typography for updates.

khaled 10y ago
Matthew Butterick just hates anything related to Google since they started Google Fonts, don’t hold your breath.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

erichocean 10y ago

> The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu”. Nofu would have been a better name if that's actually the goal.

dvcrn 10y ago

Is it possible to replace the Mac system font for some languages with this? I prefer the Noto Japanese typeface over the one that comes with Mac and would like to replace it.

scott_karana 10y ago
Possibly. Various "Helvetica to Lucida" scripts and tools came out when the default font was switched in Mavericks or Yosemite. Worth trying!
Razengan 10y ago
I'm not sure if you can replace system-wide fonts without some hacks, like [1], but maybe TinkerTool [2][3] can help a bit: [1] http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font-mac-os-x-el-capitan-lucida-grande/ http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/15/change-default-system-font-ma... [2] https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html [3] http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png http://i.imgur.com/HYwpDO4.png

sebastianconcpt 10y ago

Awesome. It took us only ~7 decades of Computing to invent this :)

ThatMightBePaul 10y ago

I wanted to try the Noto mono out for programming, but it looks like the `O` is indistinguishable from the `0` :/ Otherwise, it's a nice looking font for the editor.

unlogic 10y ago
I've just tried it, and it is absolutely the same as Droid Sans Mono (which I love and use), barring the extra line spacing. They haven't even fixed the kerning problem with "w".
blockoperation 10y ago
The lack of a dotted or slashed '0' is infuriating for me, especially considering that Droid Sans Mono has variants for both.

jyrkesh 10y ago

Has anyone managed to install the Color Emoji font on Windows? Getting something about it not being a valid font file

Turing_Machine 10y ago
I am getting similar errors on Mac OS 10.11. Looks like something may be messed up with that one.

jxy 10y ago

APL is finally gonna take the world. Thanks to google. Wait, does it have APL symbols?

iso-8859-1 10y ago
"The Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane includes the APL symbols in the Miscellaneous Technical block, which are therefore usually rendered accurately from the larger Unicode fonts installed with most modern operating systems."

soheil 10y ago

There is Old Persian but not Persian?

khaled 10y ago
Persian is written in the Arabic script. If you search for Persian it will give you Noto Arabic fonts.

amake 10y ago

The claim of full coverage of 110,000+ characters (they are targeting Unicode 6, apparently) appears to be false: Noto Sans CJK covers approximately 30K characters[1], while as of Unicode 6.0 there were 74,614 CJK Unified Ideographs (calculated from [2]). Edit: Using a script I made to check codepoint coverage[3] I get 63,639 codepoints with glyphs defined for all Noto fonts included in their default download (Noto-unhinted.zip). [1] https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/717#issuecomment-228440822 https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/717#issuecom... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs [3] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f43093b7809a5d54d/raw/b6d93e14cbe7dadaf9aa744fc65fd31045c380d2/list_ttf_chars.py https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amake/53b2331a2547b94f430...

iso-8859-1 10y ago
Did you compare it with other fonts listed on [1] like GNU Unifont, Code2000 and Arial Unicode MS? The table of that article is missing many useful columns. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces

MNukazawa 10y ago

I seem to intend to destroy it seriously. http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US.html?tofu=false http://michinarinukazawa.github.io/TofuFont/html/index_en_US...

forkandgrok 10y ago

Last time I checked, Noto Mono was not considered a monospace font by Windows' console (Command Prompt) and cannot be used for working in the console (including Bash on Ubuntu on Windows). Is that still the case?

bkhurjawal 10y ago

Robot's won't take over the world! Google will.

petecox 10y ago

Hey google team, Windows 10 reported an error: "NotoColorEmoji.ttf is not a valid font file".

chuckreynolds 10y ago

How come I get "6 serious errors were found. Do not use these fonts." in macOS Font Book? v10.11.6

mathiasrw 10y ago

How to make a quick logo? Just write the name of the company and use the https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-bugi https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-bugi font...

tomtomtom777 10y ago
Luckily, the era where a different alphabet could be rendered by using a special font while using the exact same codepoints as Latin is behind us. With Unicode, different alphabets use different codepoints and your trick won't work. (unless of course it's a Buginese company)

imeron 10y ago

I wish they would just support Latin Extended in Google Docs when Google Fonts are selected.

jug 10y ago

Why follow up Roboto? An honest question, not a rhetorical one. I don't yet prefer any one over the other. I understand it covers a large part of Unicode, but if that is what makes it unique, couldn't Roboto just be extended?

wst_ 10y ago

Looking at any fonts, recently, I am starting to crave for a 4K LCD panel. When people were switching to HD panels there were big WOW around, but after buying a smartphone, I realized that HD is good for smartphone, but not enough for anything big. I love to read on my smartphone and I love to code, too, but fonts look just crappy (especially on Windows). Sadly, good 4K panels out there are still quite pricey.

jstimpfle 10y ago
This is why i still use xterm with the default bitmap font in xterm. 10pt vector fonts on <100dpi screens look just awful.

blunte 10y ago

No slash through the monospace zero. What a huge shame.

stevejohnson 10y ago

This would make an excellent character set for a roguelike.