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> "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 langu

> "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.

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.