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More Than 800 Languages in a Single Typeface: Noto

posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-more-tofu dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A typeface five years in the making, Google Noto spans more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. A collaborative effort between Google and Monotype, the Noto typeface is a truly universal method of communication for billions of people around the world accessing digital content.

http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800-languages-in-a-single-typeface-creating-noto-for-google/

Google set Monotype a straightforward brief: "no more tofu" – tofu being the nickname for the blank boxes that are shown when a computer or site lacks font support for a particular character. To meet Google's requirement, Monotype needed to develop one typographic family that could cover the more than 800 languages included in the Unicode Consortium standard.

This mammoth effort required harmonious design and development of an unprecedented number of scripts, including several rare writing systems that had never been digitized before. "It was this really phenomenal, daunting project," says Google internationalization expert Bob Jung. "Looking back at it, I'm even surprised myself how ambitious we were."

"Our goal for Noto has been to create fonts for our devices, but we're also very interested in keeping information alive," he adds. "When it comes to some of the lesser-used languages, or even the purely academic or dead languages, we think it's really important to preserve them."

takyon: Ars Technica article and download page at Google.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:30AM (#412787)

    Makes me suspicious right off the bat.

    from TFS:

    "It was this really phenomenal, daunting project," says Google internationalization expert Bob Jung. "Looking back at it, I'm even surprised myself how ambitious we were."

    Ouch! I hope he didn't hyperextend his arm patting himself on the back. Can't Google hire an intern to develop a stroke font based on the Unicode consortium's reference database [unicode.org] of code points? Sure, that wouldn't capture differences between languages (e.g. Chinese vs. Japanese vs. Korean), but it would be a lot better than "tofu".

    TFA:

    There are some characters you can only see on stones. If you don’t move them to the web, over time those stones will become sand and we’ll never be able to recover those drawings or that writing.

    You mean the stones can't be photographed?

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:02AM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:02AM (#412797) Journal

    Meh. Just your run of the mill hyperbole.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:25PM (#412963)

    can you? shut up or put up, then, if it is so "easy".