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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.
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.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Arik on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:09AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Funny) by gtomorrow on Tuesday October 11 2016, @06:12AM
Have you not seen the examples visible on any of the posted links? Are you having problems reading any of the images? Surely you're not printing them out ("Oh, this font looks much nicer on paper!"). I'm not even quite sure where you mean to go with this diatribe. "Digital inferiority complexes"? "19th century print shop"?
Or [snark]do you have problems with any font that isn't monospace?[/snark] :)
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 11 2016, @06:33AM
I sometimes turn hinting and anti-aliasing off, for better performance on slow computers. Makes a noticeable difference on a 133Mhz Pentium. Terminus is a great monospace font when running without hinting and anti-aliasing. Most monospace fonts look horrible without hinting.
So far, I have not come across any proportional font that looks good without hinting and anti-aliasing. Shouldn't be hard to make one that looks good, but seems no one cares.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:20AM
It's not quite what I want in a gui elements font but it's passable as an in-application font. It's not fine where you need a monospace font though. For that go with unifont [unifoundry.com]. A bit ugly but even more complete than noto.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:25PM
Why do you always use monospaced anyway?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:15PM
Just to be a dick. Mod him Troll and move along.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:16PM
Munge not
9 by nine
four rows
my array.
I remember getting graph paper and having to calculate kerning and make all these little notes in pencil before coming back with a brush just to get things to line up right. Then I got a computer and what a huge advance! Digital alphabet! No more guessing, everything is clear and easy to see and easy to plot and makes sense.
And of course that was just too good to be true so we've spent the intervening decades spending most of our computing power on tasks like plotting the kerning of our shitty fonts ever so carefully so we can emulate the look of those muddy old pre-digital documents.
So yeah, I don't *only* use monospaced fonts by any means but I typically force anything important, including the web browser, to use one. Life is too short to waste hours trying to spot an array that's been mangled so badly it just looks like typical "web developer" output or figuring out that somewhere in this long string of 0-9 we actually have one or two 'O's.
Why *don't* you use monospaced fonts more?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:28PM
Well for programming, sure. If I were quoting a section of code on SoylentNews I'd monospace it. But we aren't.
And I thought using tables to lay out webpages was considered passe? *shrugs*
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:47AM
I haven't called myself a programmer for decades but 'normal' people are always claiming that the things I do with a computer are programming. I just consider it using the computer. But it still involves parsing text and anything that makes it easier and quicker for me to parse text properly is therefore helpful.
"And I thought using tables to lay out webpages was considered passe? *shrugs*"
So you're telling me you choose your tools based on *fashion*?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:05PM
So you're telling me you choose your tools based on *fashion*?
Hey, I never said it was a good reason :) As far as I'm concerned web technologies are generally a big clusterfuck. It's just unfortunate that it seems everybody wants them in their job description :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"