Noto is a

font family A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts 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, wh ...

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 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 character In computer data, a substitute character (␚) is a control character that is used to pad transmitted data in order to send it in blocks of fixed size, or to stand in place of a character that is recognized to be invalid, erroneous or unreprese ...

s (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 Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

Google Chat Google Chat (formerly known as Hangouts Chat) is a communication service developed by Google. Initially designed for teams and business environments, it has since been made available for general consumers. It provides direct message, group co ...

, Google Meet,

Google Hangouts Google Hangouts is a discontinued cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Google. It originally was a feature of Google+, becoming a standalone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger a ...

, 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 A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

, as well as the Android, Wear OS, and

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfa ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s. It is also used on the Slack apps on

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 ser ...

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, w ...

, 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 Open Sans is an open source humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson, commissioned by Google and released in 2011. It is based on his previous Droid Sans design, designed for Android mobile devices, but slightly wider. Featuring ...

, 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

which contains

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

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 le ...

and

Kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

; Latin-script letters and numerals are taken from the

Source Source may refer to: Research * Historical document * Historical source * Source (intelligence) or sub source, typically a confidential provider of non open-source intelligence * Source (journalism), a person, publication, publishing institute o ...

Pro fonts. In addition to the standard distributions, Ken Lunde of Adobe maintains a "Super"

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

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

, 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 lapt ...

or Microsoft Windows. The Noto fonts cover 150 out of the 154 scripts 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 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 hexadecima ...

. The Noto Sans Symbols fonts include a large variety of symbols, including

alchemical Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...

signs,

dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or as ...

s, numbers and letters enclosed in circles for lists, playing cards, domino and Mahjong tiles, chess piece icons, Greek, Byzantine and regular

musical symbols Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including pitch, duration, dynamics, o ...

and arrow symbols. Among mathematical symbols, it includes

blackboard bold Blackboard bold is a typeface style that is often used for certain symbols in mathematical texts, in which certain lines of the symbol (usually vertical or near-vertical lines) are doubled. The symbols usually denote number sets. One way of pro ...

glyphs, a mathematical sans-serif font modeled on

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

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 Antiqu ...

and script fonts, hexagrams, and

Aegean numerals Aegean numbers was an additive sign-value numeral system used by the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. They are attested in Linear A and Linear B scripts. They may have survived in the Cypro-Minoan script, where a single sign with "100" va ...

. 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 Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream source ...

, Gentoo Linux,

CTAN CTAN (an acronym for "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network") is the authoritative place where TeX related material and software can be found for download. Repositories for other projects, such as the MiKTeX distribution of TeX, constantly mirror mo ...

. Since version 6.0,

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

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 Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typograph ...

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, continu ...

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