12 ms·

Google Noto Fonts

589 points by oneplusone 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
teddyh 12y ago
In these enlightened Unicode days, why are fonts still “for” a language?
- cloudwalking 12y ago
  A lot of fonts don't support a lot of unicode characters.
- rabbyte 12y ago
  According to the site all the fonts together are 134MB compressed. Maybe that's the reason or maybe because it's a work in progress so works out better in segments.
  - rurounijones 12y ago
    wouldn't it be reasonable to expect, at some point in the near future, that these fonts are pre-installed on all operating systems?
    - coldtea 12y ago
      No. "Those fonts" are hundrends, if not thousands. There are already 100 or so unicode fonts installed with Windows, OS X etc. Do you really want 10GB of fonts though?
      - rurounijones 12y ago
        Where did you get 10GB "Download all fonts: ZIP in 134.6 MB" and that is only if you have ALL of them.
        coldtea 12y ago
        Sorry, understood the parent to mean "all unicode fonts", not just all Google Noto.
- bazzargh 12y ago
  Well, one reason would be that your web font would be 134Mb or so? (looking at the size of the comprehensive Noto download) The other is simple practicality - these things take time to develop, you can either wait until all the glyphs are done, or release subsets that cover languages as you work; a subset that covers part of a language isn't very useful but subsets that cover whole languages are.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    That is a technical problem to solve. There should be a way for browsers to only download the characters being rendered in the current page; so even if the file is 134Mb it could get only the little pieces of it that it needs.
    - pornel 12y ago
      There is a solution already: you split the font into separate files declare which characters are present in each file: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-range https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-ran...
- kps 12y ago
  Part of the answer is that Unicode has a lot of characters, and web pages use only a few, so for web fonts it makes sense to have the user download only ones likely to be used. Another part is that some CJK characters look somewhat different in C, J, and K. http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#3 http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#3
- kijin 12y ago
  They're not really "for" a language. They are optimized subsets of the same font that only contain glyphs from one or more languages to minimize the file size. If your website is written in English and an occasional accented character from other Western languages, there's no need to load a 50MB web font containing all the Tradntional Chinese characters.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  I would guess that it's because of the amount of work required to design glyphs for every character that retain the font's style while still capturing the character's look and meaning from its language.
- kalleboo 12y ago
  CJK unification in Unicode means that you don't know how to render a Unicode codepoint without also knowing the language of the text - the same Unicode codepoint looks different when rendered in Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
- ygra 12y ago
  There are technical reasons for this. For example m, OpenType only supports 64k glyphs within a font. Which is enough for the BMP but nothing else (and counting ligatures that are necessary for, e.g. Arabic, it might not even suffice for the BMP). Then there are practical considerations. While Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are similar enough to warrant the same styles (serif, sans-serif, script, italic, and various weights) not all of them make very much sense for, say, CJK or a variety of other scripts. So having different fonts for different scripts that are still designed to go together is actually not that bad a solution. It does mean that for good typography you need a matrix of fonts based on style and script. Word includes two fonts per style for this, to treat CJK differently, which might not be enough, depending on the numbers of different scripts involved in a single document. But a) several dozen scripts per document are somewhat rare apart from Wikipedia's language list per article and font demonstrations; and b) good typography needs effort, this won't change.
- archagon 12y ago
  A typographer typically works within a small set of languages. It would be unfeasible for a single type foundry to cover every possible glyph with the same consistency.
w1ntermute 12y ago
Hopefully this will be a big step forward in solving the problem of Han unification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification It's infuriating how many Japanese sites still don't use Unicode, purportedly because of this issue (though I suspect that it's just another example of Japan lagging when it comes to web/computer tech).
- est 12y ago
  There's some CJK sample on Adobe Typekit blog http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/ http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sa...
- rurounijones 12y ago
  The amount of Japanese systems that are SJIS only is staggering, basically all traditional IT (banks etc) uses it and does not support, nor will ever support, unicode. This, naturally, has an impact beyond those systems' borders.
- patio11 12y ago
  Every discussion we ever had about going to Unicode: "Is it bidirectional compatible with SJIS?" "No." "OK, so when it breaks, what characters does it break on?" "People's names, mostly." "... And why is this being considered?" "It is very, very convenient for white people. Almost all of their stuff works out of the box."
  - yongjik 12y ago
    I wouldn't say it's convenient for white people. Being able to write Japanese on all the non-Japanese people's stuff (basically, most websites and open-source softwares) should be mostly useful to the Japanese.
- yuubi 12y ago
  Oddly, the following more modest proposal hasn't gotten much traction: characters that share history but have divergent graphical representations in the various dialects of alphabetic script shall share codepoints, and a mechanism beyond the scope of Unicode (like lang attributes or plain guesswork) shall be used to decide whether a given codepoint means L or ᴫ or Λ or whatever.
mirzmaster 12y ago
Still no Nastaliq [1] for Urdu and Persian script. There's a great piece on Medium [2] about the death of the Urdu script at the hands of the more structured Arabic Naskh font. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script [2] https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90 https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce9...
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  Could you file a bug at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list ? This is a great place for @eteraz to get involved.
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    Since nobody did it, I filed a bug at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=39 https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=39 through my phone. the title is messed up, but I hope the message is clear.
    - kps 12y ago
      Since this article is still on the front page of HN, let me paste the response: “We are working on a Noto Nastaliq as well. So stay tuned.”
- scrollaway 12y ago
  I saw the article before and I too was deeply moved by it, but don't you think you could word this better so as not to make it sound so blasé? "Pah, no nastaliq, useless!" -- this is an amazing project.
  - mynameisvlad 12y ago
    +1. It sounds incredibly condescending the way it's written right now. Like the omission of Nastaliq is a great tragedy and Google should be deeply ashamed.
keehun 12y ago
I think this is amazing. I have never seen Cherokee glyphs that beautifully rendered before. Apparently there are still missing scripts, but this is a great step forward. This couldn't have come cheap, and I'm happy that Google is investing effort into this.
theandrewbailey 12y ago
I really like Noto Sans. From what I can tell, it's a fork of Open Sans. For the Latin alphabet it's mostly the same, but with a single story lowercase g.
- dutchbrit 12y ago
  It's just a shame that Noto Sans doesn't have a nice range of weights. They would of been better off improving Open Sans instead of creating yet another font.
- abrowne 12y ago
  Which itself is a redrawing of Droid Sans. This Typophile thread has some comparisons, and a couple comments by the designer, Steve Matteson: http://typophile.com/node/101655 http://typophile.com/node/101655
vincentchan 12y ago
Will Noto be available in Google Web Fonts later? That will be awesome.
- kijeda 12y ago
  It has been for quite some time (at least a year). https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Sans https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Sans
  - vincentchan 12y ago
    But this is for english only, not for other languages.
    - antihero 12y ago
      Link at the top of the page, https://www.google.com/fonts/earlyaccess https://www.google.com/fonts/earlyaccess has fonts, including Noto.
      - cheesy 12y ago
        Unfortunately no Noto CJK available yet
dnqthao 12y ago
Nice, we look forward in the future for Chu Nom scripts.
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  I suggest you file a bug https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list
CitizenKane 12y ago
This is incredible and is going to be very useful for people developing applications for use in Eastern Asia. Nailing typefaces for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is a huge challenge. Noto and the accompanying Source Han Sans is going to be a huge boon for people in Eastern Asia and hopefully it will have widespread adoption. Sadly, it's probably still not possible to use as a Webfont. A single font weight is over 8mb, but there is a distinct possibility this could go into mobile devices and operating systems which would be awesome.
- twerquie 12y ago
  I wonder it could be split up, and the necessary segment(s) could be dynamically loaded based on OS language preferences?
  - footpath 12y ago
    It is possible. There is a technology called dynamic subsetting that only loads the necessary glyphs on a web page: http://www.monotype.com/services/screen-imaging-solutions/dynamicsubsetting http://www.monotype.com/services/screen-imaging-solutions/dy... http://en.justfont.com/ http://en.justfont.com/
rurounijones 12y ago
Is there any reason that these could not be included as standard fonts in windows, linux, mac, android, IOS etc at some point in the near future?
- marcoms 12y ago
  No technical reasons, but it would be unlikely for Apple or Microsoft to adopt a font made by Google, when their own alternatives exist, despite technical superiority. Android already uses Roboto, which has been heavily invested in for Android 4+ and now with Material design too. Of course, by Linux I'm assuming you mean the popular distributions of it like Ubuntu, but even Ubuntu has its own font which it is unlikely to change - other non-"branded" distros probably would be the only ones who might.
  - rurounijones 12y ago
    Was hoping for a moment that we could all come together in harmony and enjoy universal access to fonts for all languages without relying on webfont kludges... hope springs eternal
jdmitch 12y ago
I wonder how the decisions for inclusion of languages were made, as there are some very odd decisions. For example, Osmanya is a script created for the Somali language that was hardly ever used (Somali literacy was only widespread after the latin alphabet was adopted - previously Arabic was commonly used). The population of actual users of this script is pretty indisputably 0. 100,000 would be a wildly ambitious estimate of the number of people who had ever actually even seen the script. On the other hand, Oriya, which has over 33 million native speakers, including 80% of India's Odisha state, does not appear to be supported.
- kijin 12y ago
  It's probably just a matter of whether or not there's somebody in the relevant team(s) who is familiar with, or at least has heard of, any given script. I wouldn't be surprised if there happens to be an Osmanya geek in Google, but none of his teammates has ever heard of Oriya. For the same reason, I wouldn't surprised if they added a bunch of geeky fictional languages before actual ones.
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    have an upvote if you file an enhancement request for Tengwar [1] at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list !! [1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm
    - kijin 12y ago
      Unfortunately, Tengwar is not an official part of Unicode. Ditto for Klingon.
- lstamour 12y ago
  In their defense, when you click India and scroll down, it does say, "not supported yet". Which leads me to believe they picked both languages with few characters (or straightforward to render?) and those most common, and they'll get to the rest shortly. :) Oriya appears to be quite complicated to render: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/oriya/intro.htm http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/oriya/intro.... Meanwhile, I wonder if this means we'll see OCR and ePubs for all kinds of scripts now; or if this will help enable Google Translate in more languages? ;-)
waitingkuo 12y ago
Nice, so glad that it support for Chinese!
jpatokal 12y ago
This is brilliant, particularly the newly released Noto CJK: http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html I'm not aware of any other font that does a decent job of handling all of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean simultaneously, and with light, bold, thin etc variants to boot. Most existing fonts, even expensive commercial ones, are lucky to support two, and even then usually regular text only.
suyash 12y ago
Anyone know what license they are released under and if it is ok to use them freely for commercial projects?
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  NotoSans/NotoSerif downloads have a LICENSE file which starts "Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004 http://www.apache.org/licenses/" http://www.apache.org/licenses/".
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  Apache 2.0, so yes.
shared4you 12y ago
I have been using Noto fonts for a more than 6 months now (mostly Indic fonts) and quite pleased with them. And just saw that they have "Noto Sans Brahmi" in the pipeline. Although Brahmi script (ancient Indian script used around 300 BC) entered Unicode in 2010, there is not a single font available that covers Brahmi. I also couldn't find any font that covers mathematical symbols from the SMP. EDIT: Just downloaded the zip archive. Unix permissions for the Bengali and Gurmukhi fonts are different from the rest of them.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  That was an interesting comment. May I ask, as a follow-up comment, what you meant by mathematical symbols from the SMP as I did the expected Google search, and I am not sure that the search results I see refer to what you were referring to.
- sp332 12y ago
  For math Symbols: Cambria Math and DejaVu Sans should have them. http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html#u1d400 http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html#u1d400
zvrba 12y ago
I looked at sample serif font, and it renders both blurry and jagged. At that size, this is quite an "achievement".
- f055 12y ago
  I have the same effect on Safari for Mac. This is lame.
idoco 12y ago
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" I love the fact that they use The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the text for showcasing the fonts, using every opportunity to stand for human rights!
marcoms 12y ago
Nice to see Material design in use on their sites for one of the first times!
- scotty79 12y ago
  Not so sure. Commandeering of my scroll-bar and slight enlargement of clicked element along with dark outer glow didn't sit well with me.
deskamess 12y ago
I find the Canada->Cree glyphs very interesting (geometrical). The art from the area is also very beautiful. If you are ever in Ottawa a trip to the Canadian Museum of History (was Civilization) is well worth it. Cherokee (US) is one fine looking set of glyphs.
greenpresident 12y ago
Note that this neatly integrates into their plan of digitizing all books ever written. Next: Brahimi Captchas.
insky 12y ago
Took me a while to work out just how to preview fonts on that page.
cihangirsavas 12y ago
it is like NATO :)
janlukacs 12y ago
Might be just me but i don't like the Sans Serif font at all, renders really bad in Safari.
- _delirium 12y ago
  The Serif looks questionable to me as well. The vertical line on the lowercase 'h' in particular looks like it has artifacts, both too thick and oddly blurred. The Greek serif has a lot of the same artifacts as well. The sans-serif looks fine, but something looks pretty wrong with the serif. I also thought it might be a client-side rendering issue (I'm using a Mac), but the demo page has the text prerendered into an image. edit: Found a different demo page that renders the webfont client-side instead of showing images, and looks much better to me: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Serif http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Serif. Maybe it's just that the pre-rendered specimens are made with a poor rendering engine?
- sebnukem2 12y ago
  It looks awfully blurry in Firefox on Linux.
  - peedy 12y ago
    On the website, they are pre rendered into images. Example, http://www.google.com/get/noto/images/samples/noto-sans_en_400_normal.png http://www.google.com/get/noto/images/samples/noto-sans_en_4...
abrowne 12y ago
The Google Code page used to have a comment on the origins of the name. Noto is short for 'no tofu', tofu being the rectangles you get when you don't have a font covering that glyph.
SimeVidas 12y ago
Largest .ttf in collection: 762KB Smallest .otf in collection: 4093KB
smrtinsert 12y ago
I am in love. Why don't they offer a monospace programming version? Noto Sans outdoes my Consolas easily for clarity. No easy feat! Please release a Noto Sans Code Google!
- amass 12y ago
  If they released a monospace version, I would switch from Inconsolata! Although it is probably more important to continue work on supporting more languages.
wahsd 12y ago
Interesting behavior when you do an in-page search for a language.
jzzocc 12y ago
https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org has used Noto for a while and it looks great.
tokenadult 12y ago
I like the implementation of CJK fonts in Noto, which was just released this week. I particularly like that I can illustrate that the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") do NOT all use the same written characters, so that Chinese people who travel to different dialect regions sometimes find written signs that they cannot read, even if they are literate in Modern Standard Chinese. (I have seen this regional illiteracy on the part of native speakers of Chinese in several contexts.) How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters (if you have a good Unicode implementation enabled as you read Hacker News), many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
- jlebar 12y ago
  I thought Han Unification meant that (most of the common) CJK characters were represented by the same Unicode code points, and that the way to differentiate like this is by specifying metadata that indicates the "language". Obviously I'm wrong, because these are just regular Unicode characters, without an HTML "lang" attribute. What gives?
  - fenomas 12y ago
    Two separate issues. Pan-CJK fonts like Noto solve a problem that arises from the fact that many CJK characters are only ever used in certain locales. Since most CJK fonts are made for a given locale, they tend not to include any of the (many) CJK characters never used in that locale. Hence, if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. That's what (I believe) this comment refers to. The Han Unification problem arises from the inverse case - characters that are used in several languages but rendered differently depending on locale[0]. For those characters, they'll render even without a pan-CJK font, but the problem is they'll render in a way that's not appropriate for their locale. [0] Another way to phrase this would be "distinct characters which share a code point becaus Unicode mistakenly thinks they're a single character whose rendering differs by locale". The difference is basically subjective.
callesgg 12y ago
My safari on my ipad crashes when I visit that page.
mahmoudhossam 12y ago
I have a question. Why would anyone list Greek under "Egypt"?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oTEQf1d9Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oTEQf1d9Iw
- Tortoise 12y ago
  Greek was spoken in Egypt for 1000 years. I imagine it's not that common today.
hownottowrite 12y ago
This page seemed really slow on mobile. I thought it was just me but... http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fget%2Fnoto%2F http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=h...
- tripzilch 12y ago
  On my netbook, Firefox warned me about an unresponsive script.

Google Noto Fonts

589 points by oneplusone 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

teddyh 12y ago

In these enlightened Unicode days, why are fonts still “for” a language?

cloudwalking 12y ago
A lot of fonts don't support a lot of unicode characters.
rabbyte 12y ago
According to the site all the fonts together are 134MB compressed. Maybe that's the reason or maybe because it's a work in progress so works out better in segments.
- rurounijones 12y ago
  wouldn't it be reasonable to expect, at some point in the near future, that these fonts are pre-installed on all operating systems?
  - coldtea 12y ago
    No. "Those fonts" are hundrends, if not thousands. There are already 100 or so unicode fonts installed with Windows, OS X etc. Do you really want 10GB of fonts though?
    - rurounijones 12y ago
      Where did you get 10GB "Download all fonts: ZIP in 134.6 MB" and that is only if you have ALL of them.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        Sorry, understood the parent to mean "all unicode fonts", not just all Google Noto.
bazzargh 12y ago
Well, one reason would be that your web font would be 134Mb or so? (looking at the size of the comprehensive Noto download) The other is simple practicality - these things take time to develop, you can either wait until all the glyphs are done, or release subsets that cover languages as you work; a subset that covers part of a language isn't very useful but subsets that cover whole languages are.
- ivanca 12y ago
  That is a technical problem to solve. There should be a way for browsers to only download the characters being rendered in the current page; so even if the file is 134Mb it could get only the little pieces of it that it needs.
  - pornel 12y ago
    There is a solution already: you split the font into separate files declare which characters are present in each file: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-range https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-ran...
kps 12y ago
Part of the answer is that Unicode has a lot of characters, and web pages use only a few, so for web fonts it makes sense to have the user download only ones likely to be used. Another part is that some CJK characters look somewhat different in C, J, and K. http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#3 http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#3
kijin 12y ago
They're not really "for" a language. They are optimized subsets of the same font that only contain glyphs from one or more languages to minimize the file size. If your website is written in English and an occasional accented character from other Western languages, there's no need to load a 50MB web font containing all the Tradntional Chinese characters.
wldcordeiro 12y ago
I would guess that it's because of the amount of work required to design glyphs for every character that retain the font's style while still capturing the character's look and meaning from its language.
kalleboo 12y ago
CJK unification in Unicode means that you don't know how to render a Unicode codepoint without also knowing the language of the text - the same Unicode codepoint looks different when rendered in Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
ygra 12y ago
There are technical reasons for this. For example m, OpenType only supports 64k glyphs within a font. Which is enough for the BMP but nothing else (and counting ligatures that are necessary for, e.g. Arabic, it might not even suffice for the BMP). Then there are practical considerations. While Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are similar enough to warrant the same styles (serif, sans-serif, script, italic, and various weights) not all of them make very much sense for, say, CJK or a variety of other scripts. So having different fonts for different scripts that are still designed to go together is actually not that bad a solution. It does mean that for good typography you need a matrix of fonts based on style and script. Word includes two fonts per style for this, to treat CJK differently, which might not be enough, depending on the numbers of different scripts involved in a single document. But a) several dozen scripts per document are somewhat rare apart from Wikipedia's language list per article and font demonstrations; and b) good typography needs effort, this won't change.
archagon 12y ago
A typographer typically works within a small set of languages. It would be unfeasible for a single type foundry to cover every possible glyph with the same consistency.

w1ntermute 12y ago

Hopefully this will be a big step forward in solving the problem of Han unification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification It's infuriating how many Japanese sites still don't use Unicode, purportedly because of this issue (though I suspect that it's just another example of Japan lagging when it comes to web/computer tech).

est 12y ago
There's some CJK sample on Adobe Typekit blog http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/ http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sa...
rurounijones 12y ago
The amount of Japanese systems that are SJIS only is staggering, basically all traditional IT (banks etc) uses it and does not support, nor will ever support, unicode. This, naturally, has an impact beyond those systems' borders.
patio11 12y ago
Every discussion we ever had about going to Unicode: "Is it bidirectional compatible with SJIS?" "No." "OK, so when it breaks, what characters does it break on?" "People's names, mostly." "... And why is this being considered?" "It is very, very convenient for white people. Almost all of their stuff works out of the box."
- yongjik 12y ago
  I wouldn't say it's convenient for white people. Being able to write Japanese on all the non-Japanese people's stuff (basically, most websites and open-source softwares) should be mostly useful to the Japanese.
yuubi 12y ago
Oddly, the following more modest proposal hasn't gotten much traction: characters that share history but have divergent graphical representations in the various dialects of alphabetic script shall share codepoints, and a mechanism beyond the scope of Unicode (like lang attributes or plain guesswork) shall be used to decide whether a given codepoint means L or ᴫ or Λ or whatever.

mirzmaster 12y ago

Still no Nastaliq [1] for Urdu and Persian script. There's a great piece on Medium [2] about the death of the Urdu script at the hands of the more structured Arabic Naskh font. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script [2] https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90 https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce9...

sandGorgon 12y ago
Could you file a bug at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list ? This is a great place for @eteraz to get involved.
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  Since nobody did it, I filed a bug at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=39 https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=39 through my phone. the title is messed up, but I hope the message is clear.
  - kps 12y ago
    Since this article is still on the front page of HN, let me paste the response: “We are working on a Noto Nastaliq as well. So stay tuned.”
scrollaway 12y ago
I saw the article before and I too was deeply moved by it, but don't you think you could word this better so as not to make it sound so blasé? "Pah, no nastaliq, useless!" -- this is an amazing project.
- mynameisvlad 12y ago
  +1. It sounds incredibly condescending the way it's written right now. Like the omission of Nastaliq is a great tragedy and Google should be deeply ashamed.

keehun 12y ago

I think this is amazing. I have never seen Cherokee glyphs that beautifully rendered before. Apparently there are still missing scripts, but this is a great step forward. This couldn't have come cheap, and I'm happy that Google is investing effort into this.

theandrewbailey 12y ago

I really like Noto Sans. From what I can tell, it's a fork of Open Sans. For the Latin alphabet it's mostly the same, but with a single story lowercase g.

dutchbrit 12y ago
It's just a shame that Noto Sans doesn't have a nice range of weights. They would of been better off improving Open Sans instead of creating yet another font.
abrowne 12y ago
Which itself is a redrawing of Droid Sans. This Typophile thread has some comparisons, and a couple comments by the designer, Steve Matteson: http://typophile.com/node/101655 http://typophile.com/node/101655

vincentchan 12y ago

Will Noto be available in Google Web Fonts later? That will be awesome.

kijeda 12y ago
It has been for quite some time (at least a year). https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Sans https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Sans
- vincentchan 12y ago
  But this is for english only, not for other languages.
  - antihero 12y ago
    Link at the top of the page, https://www.google.com/fonts/earlyaccess https://www.google.com/fonts/earlyaccess has fonts, including Noto.
    - cheesy 12y ago
      Unfortunately no Noto CJK available yet

dnqthao 12y ago

Nice, we look forward in the future for Chu Nom scripts.

sandGorgon 12y ago
I suggest you file a bug https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list

CitizenKane 12y ago

This is incredible and is going to be very useful for people developing applications for use in Eastern Asia. Nailing typefaces for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is a huge challenge. Noto and the accompanying Source Han Sans is going to be a huge boon for people in Eastern Asia and hopefully it will have widespread adoption. Sadly, it's probably still not possible to use as a Webfont. A single font weight is over 8mb, but there is a distinct possibility this could go into mobile devices and operating systems which would be awesome.

twerquie 12y ago
I wonder it could be split up, and the necessary segment(s) could be dynamically loaded based on OS language preferences?
- footpath 12y ago
  It is possible. There is a technology called dynamic subsetting that only loads the necessary glyphs on a web page: http://www.monotype.com/services/screen-imaging-solutions/dynamicsubsetting http://www.monotype.com/services/screen-imaging-solutions/dy... http://en.justfont.com/ http://en.justfont.com/

rurounijones 12y ago

Is there any reason that these could not be included as standard fonts in windows, linux, mac, android, IOS etc at some point in the near future?

marcoms 12y ago
No technical reasons, but it would be unlikely for Apple or Microsoft to adopt a font made by Google, when their own alternatives exist, despite technical superiority. Android already uses Roboto, which has been heavily invested in for Android 4+ and now with Material design too. Of course, by Linux I'm assuming you mean the popular distributions of it like Ubuntu, but even Ubuntu has its own font which it is unlikely to change - other non-"branded" distros probably would be the only ones who might.
- rurounijones 12y ago
  Was hoping for a moment that we could all come together in harmony and enjoy universal access to fonts for all languages without relying on webfont kludges... hope springs eternal

jdmitch 12y ago

I wonder how the decisions for inclusion of languages were made, as there are some very odd decisions. For example, Osmanya is a script created for the Somali language that was hardly ever used (Somali literacy was only widespread after the latin alphabet was adopted - previously Arabic was commonly used). The population of actual users of this script is pretty indisputably 0. 100,000 would be a wildly ambitious estimate of the number of people who had ever actually even seen the script. On the other hand, Oriya, which has over 33 million native speakers, including 80% of India's Odisha state, does not appear to be supported.

kijin 12y ago
It's probably just a matter of whether or not there's somebody in the relevant team(s) who is familiar with, or at least has heard of, any given script. I wouldn't be surprised if there happens to be an Osmanya geek in Google, but none of his teammates has ever heard of Oriya. For the same reason, I wouldn't surprised if they added a bunch of geeky fictional languages before actual ones.
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  have an upvote if you file an enhancement request for Tengwar [1] at https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/list !! [1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm
  - kijin 12y ago
    Unfortunately, Tengwar is not an official part of Unicode. Ditto for Klingon.
lstamour 12y ago
In their defense, when you click India and scroll down, it does say, "not supported yet". Which leads me to believe they picked both languages with few characters (or straightforward to render?) and those most common, and they'll get to the rest shortly. :) Oriya appears to be quite complicated to render: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/oriya/intro.htm http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/oriya/intro.... Meanwhile, I wonder if this means we'll see OCR and ePubs for all kinds of scripts now; or if this will help enable Google Translate in more languages? ;-)

waitingkuo 12y ago

Nice, so glad that it support for Chinese!

jpatokal 12y ago

This is brilliant, particularly the newly released Noto CJK: http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html I'm not aware of any other font that does a decent job of handling all of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean simultaneously, and with light, bold, thin etc variants to boot. Most existing fonts, even expensive commercial ones, are lucky to support two, and even then usually regular text only.

suyash 12y ago

Anyone know what license they are released under and if it is ok to use them freely for commercial projects?

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
NotoSans/NotoSerif downloads have a LICENSE file which starts "Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004 http://www.apache.org/licenses/" http://www.apache.org/licenses/".
AlyssaRowan 12y ago
Apache 2.0, so yes.

shared4you 12y ago

I have been using Noto fonts for a more than 6 months now (mostly Indic fonts) and quite pleased with them. And just saw that they have "Noto Sans Brahmi" in the pipeline. Although Brahmi script (ancient Indian script used around 300 BC) entered Unicode in 2010, there is not a single font available that covers Brahmi. I also couldn't find any font that covers mathematical symbols from the SMP. EDIT: Just downloaded the zip archive. Unix permissions for the Bengali and Gurmukhi fonts are different from the rest of them.

tokenadult 12y ago
That was an interesting comment. May I ask, as a follow-up comment, what you meant by mathematical symbols from the SMP as I did the expected Google search, and I am not sure that the search results I see refer to what you were referring to.
sp332 12y ago
For math Symbols: Cambria Math and DejaVu Sans should have them. http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html#u1d400 http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html#u1d400

zvrba 12y ago

I looked at sample serif font, and it renders both blurry and jagged. At that size, this is quite an "achievement".

f055 12y ago
I have the same effect on Safari for Mac. This is lame.

idoco 12y ago

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" I love the fact that they use The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the text for showcasing the fonts, using every opportunity to stand for human rights!

marcoms 12y ago

Nice to see Material design in use on their sites for one of the first times!

scotty79 12y ago
Not so sure. Commandeering of my scroll-bar and slight enlargement of clicked element along with dark outer glow didn't sit well with me.

deskamess 12y ago

I find the Canada->Cree glyphs very interesting (geometrical). The art from the area is also very beautiful. If you are ever in Ottawa a trip to the Canadian Museum of History (was Civilization) is well worth it. Cherokee (US) is one fine looking set of glyphs.

greenpresident 12y ago

Note that this neatly integrates into their plan of digitizing all books ever written. Next: Brahimi Captchas.

insky 12y ago

Took me a while to work out just how to preview fonts on that page.

cihangirsavas 12y ago

it is like NATO :)

janlukacs 12y ago

Might be just me but i don't like the Sans Serif font at all, renders really bad in Safari.

_delirium 12y ago
The Serif looks questionable to me as well. The vertical line on the lowercase 'h' in particular looks like it has artifacts, both too thick and oddly blurred. The Greek serif has a lot of the same artifacts as well. The sans-serif looks fine, but something looks pretty wrong with the serif. I also thought it might be a client-side rendering issue (I'm using a Mac), but the demo page has the text prerendered into an image. edit: Found a different demo page that renders the webfont client-side instead of showing images, and looks much better to me: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Serif http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Serif. Maybe it's just that the pre-rendered specimens are made with a poor rendering engine?
sebnukem2 12y ago
It looks awfully blurry in Firefox on Linux.
- peedy 12y ago
  On the website, they are pre rendered into images. Example, http://www.google.com/get/noto/images/samples/noto-sans_en_400_normal.png http://www.google.com/get/noto/images/samples/noto-sans_en_4...

abrowne 12y ago

The Google Code page used to have a comment on the origins of the name. Noto is short for 'no tofu', tofu being the rectangles you get when you don't have a font covering that glyph.

SimeVidas 12y ago

Largest .ttf in collection: 762KB Smallest .otf in collection: 4093KB

smrtinsert 12y ago

I am in love. Why don't they offer a monospace programming version? Noto Sans outdoes my Consolas easily for clarity. No easy feat! Please release a Noto Sans Code Google!

amass 12y ago
If they released a monospace version, I would switch from Inconsolata! Although it is probably more important to continue work on supporting more languages.

wahsd 12y ago

Interesting behavior when you do an in-page search for a language.

jzzocc 12y ago

https://www.ruby-lang.org https://www.ruby-lang.org has used Noto for a while and it looks great.

tokenadult 12y ago

I like the implementation of CJK fonts in Noto, which was just released this week. I particularly like that I can illustrate that the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") do NOT all use the same written characters, so that Chinese people who travel to different dialect regions sometimes find written signs that they cannot read, even if they are literate in Modern Standard Chinese. (I have seen this regional illiteracy on the part of native speakers of Chinese in several contexts.) How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters (if you have a good Unicode implementation enabled as you read Hacker News), many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

jlebar 12y ago
I thought Han Unification meant that (most of the common) CJK characters were represented by the same Unicode code points, and that the way to differentiate like this is by specifying metadata that indicates the "language". Obviously I'm wrong, because these are just regular Unicode characters, without an HTML "lang" attribute. What gives?
- fenomas 12y ago
  Two separate issues. Pan-CJK fonts like Noto solve a problem that arises from the fact that many CJK characters are only ever used in certain locales. Since most CJK fonts are made for a given locale, they tend not to include any of the (many) CJK characters never used in that locale. Hence, if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. That's what (I believe) this comment refers to. The Han Unification problem arises from the inverse case - characters that are used in several languages but rendered differently depending on locale[0]. For those characters, they'll render even without a pan-CJK font, but the problem is they'll render in a way that's not appropriate for their locale. [0] Another way to phrase this would be "distinct characters which share a code point becaus Unicode mistakenly thinks they're a single character whose rendering differs by locale". The difference is basically subjective.

callesgg 12y ago

My safari on my ipad crashes when I visit that page.

mahmoudhossam 12y ago

I have a question. Why would anyone list Greek under "Egypt"?

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oTEQf1d9Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oTEQf1d9Iw
Tortoise 12y ago
Greek was spoken in Egypt for 1000 years. I imagine it's not that common today.

hownottowrite 12y ago

This page seemed really slow on mobile. I thought it was just me but... http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fget%2Fnoto%2F http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=h...

tripzilch 12y ago
On my netbook, Firefox warned me about an unresponsive script.