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NPR is reporting that Google is working on a new font that will support every known written language.
Google has taken on its fair share of ambitious projects--digitizing millions and millions of books, mapping the whole world, pioneering self-driving cars. It's a company that doesn't shy away from grand plans.
But one recent effort, despite its rather lofty scope, has escaped much notice. The company is working on a font that aims to include "all the world's languages"--every written language on Earth.
"Tofu" is what the pros call those tiny, empty rectangles that show up when a script isn't supported. This is where Google's new font family, "Noto," gets its name: "No Tofu."
Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world--specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts--the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive.
But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @08:26AM
You may have heard of the concept of using several fonts in the same document. So just typeset the Japanese parts of the book in a Japanese font, and the Chinese parts in a Chinese font.
There's absolute no reason all the information must be contained in the character codes.
And even if you insist on having all the information in the character codes, you can just put modifiers in the private use space. Just like you can have a standard modifier for "switch to right-to-left mode", you also can have a modifier for "switch to Chinese character mode".
However one might consider adding standard "language switch" codes to Unicode, since the language also affects things like proper capitalization (the upper case of "i" is "I" in English, but "İ" in Turkish, where the lower case of "I" is "ı").
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday August 06 2014, @07:22AM
The problem with multiple fonts is that plain Unicode text has no support for them. You need a document format with metadata.
Take as an example the tags on a MP3 file. There are some Japanese artists who sing in Japanese, Chinese and Korean on the same album. Given that the tags don't support fonts and even if they did how many MP3 players would also have support, you can see how it is actually impossible to accurately describe their work in the file's metadata. Same with the file name.
I agree that modifiers would help, but unfortunately the Unicode standards body refuses to allow them. It would be a hack anyway; the best thing would be to abandon the current characters and assign a whole set of new ones for each language. It would be a huge pain for all involved but I can't see any other way of fixing Unicode at this point.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)