SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.