California based search-giant Google is called a giant for a reason. The company has always worked towards getting the world closer together through the power of Internet and its diverse services/products. And now, the search-giant has done it again.
The company is now making serious efforts to make it easier for people all around the world to create and share information in their own native languages. For this, Google has given birth to a massive open source font family that spans over more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.
This takes into account every single symbol in the Unicode standard that is there present today. The project was initiated with an aim of making Android and Chrome operating system more accessible to people speaking diverse languages. It took Google a total of five long years to bring this entire project to a completion. They also had to take in the help of various font design and typography experts from Adobe and Monotype for the project.
Google decided to give the project the name from the phrase ‘No more tofu’, which refers to ridding the Web of blank characters (‘⯐’ , a.k.a. tofu), which get displayed when the necessary symbol from a certain language isn’t available on the user’s system. Noto promises to offer a sophisticated, unified look across all languages and the best thing is, it is absolutely free to be used for any sort of project.
The Noto font family, inclusive of all its weights and styles, comes in at a heavy 472MB. The largest packages include Simplfied Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean characters. One can make a choice if one wants all of them at once or pick only the ones they require. If one requires only English, they can go with the first three tiny packages.
Since Google has made Noto open source, one can easily download the design source files for themselves from this GitHub repository.