I wonder how the decisions for inclusion of languages were made, as there are some very odd decisions. For example, Osmanya is a script created for the Somali language that was hardly ever used (Somali literacy was only widespread after the latin alphabet was adopted - previously Arabic was commonly used). The population of actual users of this script is pretty indisputably 0. 100,000 would be a wildly ambitious estimate of the number of people who had ever actually even seen the script.<p>On the other hand, Oriya, which has over 33 million native speakers, including 80% of India's Odisha state, does not appear to be supported.
I like the implementation of CJK fonts in Noto, which was just released this week. I particularly like that I can illustrate that the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") do NOT all use the same written characters, so that Chinese people who travel to different dialect regions sometimes find written signs that they cannot read, even if they are literate in Modern Standard Chinese. (I have seen this regional illiteracy on the part of native speakers of Chinese in several contexts.)<p>How you might write the conversation<p>"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?<p>"No, he doesn't."<p>他會說普通話嗎？<p>他不會。<p>in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write<p>"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?<p>"No, he doesn't."<p>佢識唔識講廣東話？<p>佢唔識。<p>in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters (if you have a good Unicode implementation enabled as you read Hacker News), many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
This is brilliant, particularly the newly released Noto CJK: <a href="http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html</a><p>I'm not aware of <i>any</i> other font that does a decent job of handling all of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean simultaneously, and with light, bold, thin etc variants to boot. Most existing fonts, even expensive commercial ones, are lucky to support two, and even then usually regular text only.
Still no Nastaliq [1] for Urdu and Persian script. There's a great piece on Medium [2] about the death of the Urdu script at the hands of the more structured Arabic Naskh font.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script</a><p>[2] <a href="https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce9...</a>
Hopefully this will be a big step forward in solving the problem of Han unification: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification</a><p>It's infuriating how many Japanese sites still don't use Unicode, purportedly because of this issue (though I suspect that it's just another example of Japan lagging when it comes to web/computer tech).
I think this is amazing. I have never seen Cherokee glyphs that beautifully rendered before. Apparently there are still missing scripts, but this is a great step forward. This couldn't have come cheap, and I'm happy that Google is investing effort into this.
The Google Code page used to have a comment on the origins of the name. Noto is short for 'no tofu', tofu being the rectangles you get when you don't have a font covering that glyph.
This is incredible and is going to be very useful for people developing applications for use in Eastern Asia. Nailing typefaces for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is a huge challenge. Noto and the accompanying Source Han Sans is going to be a huge boon for people in Eastern Asia and hopefully it will have widespread adoption.<p>Sadly, it's probably still not possible to use as a Webfont. A single font weight is over 8mb, but there is a distinct possibility this could go into mobile devices and operating systems which would be awesome.
I have been using Noto fonts for a more than 6 months now (mostly Indic fonts) and quite pleased with them. And just saw that they have "Noto Sans Brahmi" in the pipeline. Although Brahmi script (ancient Indian script used around 300 BC) entered Unicode in 2010, there is not a single font available that covers Brahmi.<p>I also couldn't find any font that covers mathematical symbols from the SMP.<p>EDIT: Just downloaded the zip archive. Unix permissions for the Bengali and Gurmukhi fonts are different from the rest of them.
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights"
I love the fact that they use The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the text for showcasing the fonts, using every opportunity to stand for human rights!
I am in love. Why don't they offer a monospace programming version? Noto Sans outdoes my Consolas easily for clarity. No easy feat! Please release a Noto Sans Code Google!
I really like Noto Sans. From what I can tell, it's a fork of Open Sans. For the Latin alphabet it's mostly the same, but with a single story lowercase g.
This page seemed really slow on mobile. I thought it was just me but...<p><a href="http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fget%2Fnoto%2F" rel="nofollow">http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=h...</a>
I find the Canada->Cree glyphs very interesting (geometrical). The art from the area is also very beautiful. If you are ever in Ottawa a trip to the Canadian Museum of History (was Civilization) is well worth it.<p>Cherokee (US) is one fine looking set of glyphs.