The Noto Project, is a five-year collaboration between Google and font specialist Monotype, to create a typeface that applies to any language and make Android and ChromeOS more accessible. The fonts are available under an open source OFL (Open Font License), both to use and to be modified with more design tweaks. The name Noto comes from the phrase ‘No more tofu’, and its aim is to efficiently free the world of little blocks (‘?’ , a.k.a. tofu) that appear when a device sees a character it doesn’t recognize. With Noto, no device will ever need show these blocks again. Noto offers an elegant and unified look across languages. With the Noto typeface family, Google wants to preserve our languages and cultures, even the rarely-used or dead ones: “Our goal for Noto has been to create fonts for our devices, but we’re also very interested in keeping information alive. When it comes to some of these lesser-used languages, or even the purely academic or dead languages, we think it’s really important to preserve them. Without the digital capability of Noto, it’s much more difficult to preserve that cultural resource,” said Bob Jung, director of internationalization for Google. As new characters are introduced into the Unicode standard, Google will add these into the Noto font family. The entire font family, with all its weights and styles, comes in at a heavy 472MB (the biggest packages include Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean characters). You can pick only the ones you need or can grab them all at once; if you only want English, you can just select the first three tiny packages.
Google has also made those available through its excellent recently refurbished Web Fonts site. The full Noto font family, design source files, and the font building pipeline are available for free at the links below. • 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 Google and Monotype are continuing to add more scripts, languages and characters to the font family with the help of external designers and linguistic experts. Source: Google Developers Blog
