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:"Now available to download" link

[ptaff]

Google Web Fonts is still the way to go.

And helps Google track users one more way. Please be a good hacker and serve fonts from your own domain. Thank you.

This should have been put together by Unicode

[complete loony]

The Unicode consortium should have published glyphs like these as part of the effort of defining the standard.

Why did it take a separate private company to do this?

No programmers' typeface

[tdelaney]

They have a monospaced typeface, but it's not useable for programming - doesn't even have a significant distinction between zero and O, let alone any other programmer-friendly features.

Since I presume they're going to want people at Google to use Noto as standard, it seems sensible to me that they create a programmers' version.

Re:No programmers' typeface

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why distinguishing between the zero digit and the letter O is more important for programmers than for anyone else. Sure, programmers might make mistakes when writing code and want to fix them; but that's true for other people writing text that might contain digits and letters, too.

If anything, distinguishing between the characters is less important for programmers than other people because programmers will already notice the problem when their code won't compile. I think it is very probable not distinguishing the zero digit and the letter O was a deliberate design decision, and I doubt distinguishing between letters is as important as programmers seem to think it is.

Re:No programmers' typeface

[Hypoon]

...because programmers will already notice the problem when their code won't compile.

Substitutions of the letter 'O' for the number zero in numeric literals, function names, variable names, and other similar constructs will usually generate syntax errors, yes. (This makes me want to create a library called "Input0utput", just for headaches.)

However, the compiler probably won't notice if you make the substitution within a string or character literal (if the user types "Outbound", but the software is expecting "0utbound", this might be a hard problem to debug). I've only done this once or twice, but it was infuriating. It's one of those few times when commenting out the line and retyping it verbatim will actually fix the problem.

The fact that the keys are adjacent on QWERTY keyboards doesn't help anything.

...but that's true for other people writing text that might contain digits and letters, too.

I misunderstood this at first. I was picturing something like, "Mr. Orville's appointment is at 1O:OO.", where the substitution is harmless, so I didn't understand. In something like a model number, "MSO001" might be the first (001) release of a Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (MSO). Writing it as "MSOOO1" definitely obfuscates the meaning behind the model number. Of course, "MSO-001" would probably be best, but it's preferable to match the label on the hardware itself. So yes, I see your point.

But no, I'm firmly of the belief that the average programmer has a greater need (than the average typist) for easily distinguishable characters.

Re:No programmers' typeface

[Nethead]

Where I find the problem is in randomly generated passwords. I have a large spreadsheet of VPN passwords for users at work that I had to change the the password column to an OCR font just to make sure I was giving out the correct code.

The original C64 had this issue which was worse on the SX64 with its 5" screen. I went as far as to design a custom font and burn it into the font EPROM.

Re:Keeping up with the emojis

[DraconPern]

I think it's more, this is all the glyph in one font, where as before, you had Chinese, Arabic etc. all in separate fonts.  The other half the problem google had was that they didn't have good font rendering in Android, e.g. how you actually render the font.  Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe had it figured out a long time ago and all that knowledge is part of the OS.  So google is basically just playing catch up and open sourcing the data part.  Also... do we really want to load that large of a font when most people only use a fraction of the data? 

Re: "Now available to download" link

[TheRaven64]

It's not always laziness (or tracking, from Google's perspective). Google sets a long cache value for most of these resources. If 10 different sites all host them individually, then someone visiting the site will have to download the fonts 10 times. Alternatively, if they all point to Google then they'll download once and cache the copy locally for the other 9 sites.

There was a proposal a couple of years ago to embed a cryptographic hash of the resource in the link. This would allow you to specify a download location, but if you've already downloaded the file from another source then you could still use it (it would also make caches more efficient, because you could set an infinite timeout and make clients redownload by having a different hash in the link - clients would keep their copy potentially forever, until you updated the version). I don't know of any browsers that implemented it though.