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 fritsd on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:24AM
Your post sounded very important and informative, so I actually bothered to check the license, and you're right.
It sounds like they went out of their way to license their font in a FLOSS-compatible way, for maximal freedom of usage.
I just browsed the license (I am not a lawyer!), and the only thing that is a bit restricted is what they call "reserved font name" so you can't call your derivative fonts "Noto" without explicit permission of the copyright holder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @02:03PM
FSF has the following to say about the license [gnu.org]:
They call out the renaming requirement on other licenses, but oddly do not mention it for this one. Nevertheless, it is not a serious problem with the license because font names don't really matter: it is possible to configure a system to use a replacement font with a new name in place of the original, so it is only a minor inconvenience to install and use a modified version of a font under this license.