Google reveals free font family for over 800 languages

“Noto” is a font family of more than 800+ languages created by Google, with the aim to support all Unicode supported languages with a “harmonious look and feel”. It includes fonts for Urdu, Baluchi, Pashto, Sindhi and Punjabi.

Noto has been in development for years and Google partnered with experts from Monotype, Adobe and many volunteer reviewers. Now, it finally supports all current Unicode characters. New characters will be added to Noto as they are introduced in Unicode.

Noto was created to have a family of fonts that would bring homogeneity and a unified look to different languages. This might make multilingual pages and websites better looking.

Support to such a large number of languages would also allow users to share information on the internet in the language of their choice. According to the official FAQ, the design goal was to have great online readability across different languages, without losing the uniqueness of each script.

The name Noto is derived from the phrase “no more tofu”, referring to Google’s objective of clearing online text from “tofu”, the character that appears when the original character or symbol is not supported on the user’s device.

In addition to this, Google hopes Noto will be useful in preserving the history and culture of rare and endangered languages. In this regard, Noto even has fonts for a number of dead languages.

The whole Noto family can be downloaded at once in a 472 MB file. Or you can simply download the fonts for languages you need by searching your required language on the Noto website. Being open source, the design source files are also available to everyone on the Noto GitHub repository.

Source: Google Developer’s Blog