If you didn’t know, there’s a word for the empty box icon that shows up in a text when a character isn’t recognized by your computer’s software: tofu. Now, Google wants to eliminate tofu with a new open source font system that gets rid of that character recognition problem.
Noto, an acronym for “No more tofu,” is the result of five years of work by Google in partnership with the type-related technology company Monotype, as well as Adobe and a network of volunteers. Released for general availability on Thursday, Noto is an open-source family of fonts that supports the display of some 110,000 characters from 800 languages.
Noto “provides pan-language harmony, yet maintains authenticity,” according to Google. The goal of Noto was to create a font family that was like classically styled clothing — elegant but able to be worn “forever.”
A ‘Mammoth Effort’
“Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience,” Xiangye Xiao and Bob Jung of Google’s Internationalization team wrote yesterday in a blog post. However, when Google began the Noto project, “we did not realize the enormity of the challenge,” they added.
Developing a font system that worked with hundreds of languages required input from experts in a variety of specific scripts, as well as extensive design and technical testing, Xiao and Jung said. Different languages presented different challenges. For example, every character in Arabic can take on one of four different glyphs, or shapes, depending on the character that follows.
“This mammoth effort required harmonious design and development of an unprecedented number of scripts, including several rare writing systems that had never been digitized before,” Monotype noted yesterday in a separate article on its Web site. “Taking more than five years to reach its current stage, Noto required an intense and coordinated research effort, partnering with cultural experts to investigate the nuances of each style, and incorporating direct feedback from the communities using the script.”
Also Aimed at Language Preservation
Available for free download from Google’s Fonts site, Noto was developed as part of the company’s Internationalization mission, which is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Additional Noto-related tools and resources for developers can also be found on the GitHub script repository.
In addition to supporting written characters from widely spoken languages such as Greek, Hebrew, Tagalog and Vietnamese, Noto also enables text to be displayed in the Canadian Aboriginal writing system; Saurashtra, a primarily spoken, rather than written, Indo-Aryan language used in parts of southern India; and Adlam, a writing system developed for speakers of the African language Fulani.
“Even though we prioritize widely used languages, we still want to support other languages, even if there are no people still speaking them,” said Xiao. “There are some characters you can only see on stones. If you don’t move them to the Web, over time those stones will become sand and we’ll never be able to recover those drawings or that writing.”
Noto is a “digital workhorse” that works for text across Android-powered and Chrome-powered devices, and also supports emojis, musical notation and other symbols, according to Monotype. Xiao and Jung noted that it can display “every symbol in the Unicode standard.”
For now, however, that doesn’t include constructed languages like Klingon or Elvish, Google said, adding that fans should “[p]lease contact the Unicode consortium to encourage them to support your favorite invented language.”
