Google Debuts Noto, an Open Source Font System

Google has been on a font-finding mission.

The Noto project, five years in the making, has put together a font family covering the more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters found in the Unicode standard.

“A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: ⯐. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience,” Google said in a blog post.

“Today, Google’s open source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard.”

To make Noto a reality, Google partnered with a number of experts in the field of type and font design, including Monotype and Adobe as well as “an amazing network of volunteer reviewers.”

Noto, Google said, will be “used to preserve the history and culture of rare languages through digitization.” And, as new characters are added to the Unicode standard, they will be added to the Noto font family as well.

Noto, which stands for ‘No more tofu,’ is now available for free:

• Noto fonts download: https://www.google.com/get/noto/
• Design source files: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-source
• Font building pipeline: https://github.com/googlei18n/fontmake

Jennifer Cowan is the Managing Editor for SiteProNews.

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