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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Unicode-complete dept.

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."

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Keeping up with the emojis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hate to say it but I consider the conversion of all emojis to tofu a feature, not a bug. The tofu neatly summarises the vacuousness of the original abomination... I mean, message.

  2. Re:"Now available to download" link by _merlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, but it's like "90% of people use 10% of features" - everyone uses a different 10%, so 100% of features are used. Similarly, everyone needs a different combination of languages, so if you're going to use one family of fonts, you want to have massive coverage.

  3. Repairing the Unicode Consortium Clusterfuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thank you Google! This is badly needed because the Unicode Consortium screwed up Asian language support badly. The problem started when a bunch of Silicon Valley WASPS got together and formed the Unicode Consortium. Their experts were a joke. They had a foreign language expert who by his own admission couldn't speak the language he was supposedly expert it.

    Then without consulting Asian language speakers they decided to combine all the Asian language characters - including those that were physically different.The result was like some elitist looking at the Greek and Roman alphabets and deciding 'a' is a lot like alpha, 'b' a lot like beta, so why not comine the two of them into a single alphabet, then tell you your name isn't Sam, it's "S". (Slashdot probably won't display this but you get the idea.) This affected eastern and central and south east asian languages.

    This created the absurd situation where some people couldn't even spell write their names or enter them into databases prompting the famous "I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can't Write My Name" https://modelviewculture.com/p...

    When it was pointed out did the Unicode Consortium admit they fucked up and fix it? Nope. They dug in their heels and insisted each country produce their own font which would display each Unicode character differently to suit their own language. Given the original goals of Unicode this was an amazing backflip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://books.google.com/books... https://plus.google.com/+LizHa... There are other problems too: The encoding the consortium expected makes asian codepages use more space than the standards they were supposed to replace. This was stupid since ASCII was already super efficient for English language, so what was the point?

    If you only write English language software and ASCII is good enough you won't notice any of this but if you have to write International software it's a nightmare. Yes, you might think adding Unicode support allows any your app to run in any language, but it doesn't work like that because of this clusterfuck. You still have to provide different fonts for different countries, and you often have to provide support for old codepages (the various BIG5 variants) for fallback which Unicode was supposed to replace. It also makes translation very hard.

    But Unicode fixed it eventually? Nope. The Unicode consortium continued to ignore it to this very day and instead started churning out stupid emoji: a steaming pile of poo, a taco, and farcical 'equality' emoticons. https://www.theguardian.com/te... https://www.theguardian.com/ar...

    I hope this new font gives us one font which can display all languages and fuck the Unicode Consortium

  4. hells teeth by johnjones · · Score: 3, Interesting

    honestly

    where is the mathematical fonts and symbols for science ?

    STIX goes some way but why this is not in noto ?

    why would you send a mathematical explanation into the stars but we cant express those notations on machines we use every day ?

    thanks

    John Jones