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Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the
scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...
encoded in the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
standard. , Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1 (April 2012), although fewer than 30,000 of the nearly 75,000
CJK unified ideographs The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. In the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode ...
in version 6.0 are covered. In total, Noto fonts cover nearly 64,000 characters, which is under half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0 (released in September 2022). The Noto family is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned by
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, the font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Until September 2015, the fonts were under the Apache License 2.0.


Etymology

When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as substitute characters (typically small rectangles). They represent the characters that cannot be displayed because no font with the necessary characters is installed on the computer, and have sometimes been called by the slang name ''tofu'' because of their visual similarity to the food of the same name. Google's aim for Noto (whose name is derived from ''no tofu'') is to remove this kind of 'tofu' from the Web. The name Noto also means ''I write, I mark, I note'' in Latin.


Characteristics


Emoji

The Noto Emoji Project provides color and black-and-white emoji fonts. The color version is used on the Gmail, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Hangouts, and
YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
web apps, as well as the Android, Wear OS, and ChromeOS
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
s. It is also used on the Slack apps on Windows,
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
, and Android.


Latin, Greek and Cyrillic

Noto Sans and Noto Serif contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs. Noto Sans is based on Droid Sans and Open Sans, while Noto Serif is based on Droid Serif. They are designed by Steve Matteson.


CJK

Noto CJK fonts are rebranded versions of Adobe Source Han fonts, developed by Adobe and
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
which contains Chinese characters,
Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The l ...
and Kana; Latin-script letters and numerals are taken from the Source
Pro Pro is an abbreviation meaning " professional". Pro, PRO or variants thereof may also refer to: People * Miguel Pro (1891–1927), Mexican priest * Pro Hart (1928–2006), Australian painter * Mlungisi Mdluli (born 1980), South African retire ...
fonts. In addition to the standard distributions,
Ken Lunde Ken Roger Lunde (, born 12 August 1965 in Madison, Wisconsin)Lunde, 2008. is an American specialist in information processing for East Asian languages. Academic Background Ken majored in linguistics at University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985, ...
of Adobe maintains a "Super" OpenType Collection (OTC) version that provides the families under two names at once. Since OTCs reuse existing glyphs, such a file containing both ''Noto'' and ''Source'' fonts is only 200KB larger than one containing only ''Source'' fonts.


Coverage

there are 195 Noto fonts, of which 156 are sans-serif style, 29 are serif style, and the remaining 10 fonts are not classified as serif or sans-serif. The Noto Color Emoji font only works under Android and
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
, and cannot be installed under
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
or
Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...
. The Noto fonts cover 150 out of the 154
scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...
defined in Unicode version 13.0 (released in March 2020), as well as various syllables and emoji which do not belong to a specific script. As of October 2016, all scripts encoded up to Unicode version 6.0 (released October 2010) were covered by Noto fonts, although not all characters defined in Unicode version 6.0 were covered. In particular, only about 30,000 of the 74,616
CJK unified ideographs The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. In the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode ...
defined in Unicode version 6.0 were covered by Noto fonts. None of the 53 scripts and 1 block encoded between Unicode versions 6.1 and 11.0 were covered by Noto fonts, although some symbols, emoji, and characters added to existing scripts after version 6.0 were covered. It is a design goal for 'Phase 3' to cover all characters in Unicode version 9.0 except for most of CJK unified ideographs outside the
Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadeci ...
. The Noto Sans Symbols fonts include a large variety of symbols, including alchemical signs, dingbats, numbers and letters enclosed in circles for lists, playing cards, domino and Mahjong tiles, chess piece icons, Greek, Byzantine and regular musical symbols and arrow symbols. Among mathematical symbols, it includes blackboard bold glyphs, a mathematical sans-serif font modeled on Helvetica,
Fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiq ...
and script fonts, hexagrams, and Aegean numerals. As of April 2021, the Noto fonts in the GitHub repository have this coverage of Unicode 13:


List of Noto fonts


Usage

Some projects provide a package for installing Noto fonts, e.g. Debian, Arch Linux, Fedora Linux, Gentoo Linux, CTAN. Since version 6.0, LibreOffice bundles Noto. Since 2019, ''Noto IKEA'', a customised version of Noto Sans, is a corporate typeface of IKEA. It is used in pair with standard versions of Noto Sans and they replaced Verdana as a corporate typeface.


References


External links

*
noto-fontsnoto-fonts-alphanoto-cjknoto-emojinoto-source
 –
GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...
repositories {{Free and open-source typography Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Free software Unicode typefaces Software using the Apache license 2013 introductions IPA typefaces Latin-script typefaces Cyrillic typefaces Greek typefaces CJK typefaces