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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: 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?"