Although most developers don't focus on it,
font is often the most critical component
of your application or website.
If you don't have the right font for the right language,
all your build for design can quickly be destroyed.
Hi, my name is Xiangye Xiao, and today I
will talk about Google's international font Noto.
Let's look at a few examples.
On the left image, characters for Meetei Mayek
are displayed as Tofu.
Effectively, the characters are displayed as little boxes
to indicate your device doesn't have a font
to display the text.
The image on the right highlights
another difficult situation.
The text is there, but ugly because it's
displayed using fonts of mismatched styles and weights.
Developers constantly have to address both issues.
But sadly, solutions aren't always ideal.
For example, the Daily Express Urdu, a Pakistani news website,
runs into the problem that the Urdu Nastaleeq font
style, preferred by Pakistani people,
isn't available for the majority of devices.
So they had to pre-process every web page
to present images instead.
While that works, it pulls a tremendous amount of time
in preprocessing as well as bandwidth for the servers
and load time for the users, which isn't really ideal.
With the goal of supporting all languages
with a harmonious look and feel, Google
has been developing a font family called Noto.
Noto is Google's answer to Tofu.
The name Noto is to convey the idea that Google's goal is
to see no more Tofu.
To date, Noto has supported over 300 languages,
using more than 90 scripts, covering 110,000 characters.
It has covered all major living languages,
such as English, Vietnamese, Greek, Russian, Thai, Arabic,
Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu,
and way beyond.
It also supports smaller languages,
like Meetei Mayek and even ancient languages,
like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Look at this image.
It includes a sample of Noto for a subset of languages
supported by this font.
I bet only a small number of people
could find Cherokee and cuneiform in the image.
As a developer, supporting different languages
comes with a bit of overhead that you have to design for.
In addition to eliminating Tofu, another important goal of Noto
is to provide harmonious look and feel across languages.
To achieve harmony is not as simple as setting
the same height for all languages.
For example, tall languages, like Tibetan in this image,
will look really squeezed and much harder
to read than English, although the same height for English
and Tibetan is actually set.
Different baselines and vertical metrics of different languages
need to be considered to achieve harmony.
But with Noto this isn't a problem.
On the right image, you can see how two popular English
and Thai fonts make the text difficult to read and messy.
Look at the different sizes, spacing,
and the letter kerning.
But with Noto on the left, these values
are nicely normalized, so each language is just
as easy to read as the next.
But don't worry.
All of this support doesn't come at the cost of the design
choices that so many beautiful applications require.
Noto provides sans-serif and the serif
styles for many languages.
It supports seven weights for CJK
and two weights for many other languages.
In some cases, Noto represents the frontier
of font development.
For example, Noto Sans CJK is the very first pan-CJK font
family in the world.
It supports ideographic characters
following different regional writing conventions
for simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese,
and the Korean users.
So in the past, quite of few Taiwanese Android users
were upset because a lot of traditional Chinese characters
were displayed in a wrong way.
Look at the highlighted text in the screenshot.
Three out of eight characters are
wrong with the old font on Android.
Now with Noto, Taiwanese users can finally
see their language displayed in the right way on Android
since Lollipop.
What's best, Noto is open source and free for anybody to use,
such as bundled with your app or used as a web font.
Noto has been used by Android and Chrome OS
as the default system fonts.
Many Noto fonts are also onboard on Google Web Fonts Early
Access and was broadly picked up by popular Linux distros.
To date, 1 billion users are benefitting from Noto fonts
on their phones, tablets, desktops, and even wearables.
As developers start looking towards international success,
getting the font right is the first big problem
you have to tackle, and with Noto it's not a problem at all.
So download the Noto packages and start
thinking globally today.
Thank you.