Google Releases An Open Source Font That Supports 800 Languages (googleblog.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Hot Hardware: It's been working on the project over the past five years in collaboration with Monotype in hopes of eradicating so-called "tofu" -- the blank boxes you see when a PC or website can't display a particular text -- from the web. Noto, or No more tofu, is Google's answer, and it's available now to download...

"We are thrilled to have played such an important role in what has become one of the most significant type projects of all time," said Scott Landers, president and CEO of Monotype... Monotype played the biggest role, though Google also collaborated with Adobe and had a network of volunteer reviewers. As far as Monotype is concerned, Noto is one of the expansive typography projects ever undertaken.
There's 110,000 characters, and Google says the project "required design and technical testing in hundreds of languages."

Comments

Re:Keeping up with the emojis

[dmoen]

Bitstream Cyberbit was closed source, and had a license incompatible with GPL. Noto is free and open source. The source files for the fonts, and the build tools, are all open.

Noto is an ongoing open source project that will continue to track the Unicode standard, while Cyberbit implemented Unicode 1.0.1 and then just stopped.

Noto has Sans and Serif variants in a range of weights and styles, unlike Cyberbit, which had only a single style and weight (serif).

So that's more than just "the same thing all over again".