While most things inside our digitized world is made from programming languages that work behind the scene, the surface that most people see where things are populated is created by our own languages.
In its effort to make things easier for people, Google has created Noto, a massive open-source font family.
Noto covers every symbol standard in the Unicode. And by spanning to have more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters, to cover every aspect, it's having all Unicode's standard symbol in its inventory.
The name Noto comes from the phrase "No more tofu", which refers to blank characters (⯐ or "tofu"), which are displayed when the necessary symbol from a certain language isn’t available on the user's system. According to Google, this "tofu" can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.
The initial aim for the project was to make Android and ChromeOS more accessible.
By having Noto available, Noto's elegant and unified look across languages can be used for free by developers and practically everyone else.
Noto's inventory of fonts, with all its weights and styles, comes with a 472MB package (the largest ones include Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean characters).
So to finish to finish the project, the company took five years to complete it by seeing the involvement of typography and font design experts from Monotype and Adobe, as well as a network of volunteers.
And because Noto is essentially a place that covers any type of displayable text characters, as Google describes it: it's a way to "preserve the history and culture of rare languages through digitization."
Users can download all of Noto's fonts, or just pick and choose whichever they want or need. And to make things simpler, Google has also made those fonts available through its Web Fonts website.
Noto is an open-source project which its design source files are available to download on GitHub's repository. The company said that it's committed to keep Noto up to date, and will also continually add new types as Unicode grows to support more characters and languages.