Noto is a free

font family A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width ...

comprising over 100 individual

computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printi ...

s, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the

Unicode standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , 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. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Uni ...

in version 6.0 are covered. In total, Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around 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 and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, the font is licensed under the

SIL Open Font License The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products. OFL is a free and open source license. It was created by SIL Global, the ...

. 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. Noto is also derived from the Latin word ''noto'', meaning "I write, I mark, I note", signifying Noto's goal of the ability to write in every language.

Characteristics

Emoji

The Noto Emoji Project provides color and black-and-white

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

fonts. The color version is used on the

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

Google Chat Google Chat is a Communication software, communication service developed by Google. Initially designed for teams and business environments, it has since been made available for general consumers. It provides Private message, direct messaging, ...

Google Meet Google Meet is a video communication service developed by Google. It is one of two apps that constitute the replacement for Google Hangouts, the other being Google Chat. It replaced the consumer-facing Google Duo on November 1, 2022, with ...

Google Voice Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace (G Suite by October 2020) customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switz ...

, and

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

web apps A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

, as well as the Android,

Wear OS Wear OS, formerly Android Wear, is a closed-source Android (operating system), Android distribution designed for smartwatches and other wearable computer, wearable computers, developed by Google. Wear OS is designed to pair with mobile phones run ...

, and

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. It is also used on the Slack apps on

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, 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 that was designed by Steve Matteson under commission from Google. It was released in 2011 and is based on his earlier design called Droid Sans, which was specifically created for Android ...

, while Noto Serif is based on Droid Serif. They are designed by

Steve Matteson Steven R. Matteson (born 1965) is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Microsoft font family ...

. As recorded by the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

as being the preferred form for typesetting use, Noto Sans displays as "d+apostrophe" rather than "d with a

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

diacritic".

CJK

Noto CJK fonts are also known as Adobe Source Han fonts, developed together by

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

and

which contains

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

and

kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...

; 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 ...

Pro Pro is an abbreviation meaning "professional". Pro, PRO or variants thereof might also refer to: People * Miguel Pro (1891–1927), Mexican priest * Pro Hart (1928–2006), Australian painter * Mlungisi Mdluli (born 1980), South African ret ...

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

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

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 In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

style, 29 are

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

style, and the remaining 10 fonts are not classified as serif or sans-serif. Noto Color Emoji provides multi-color emoji symbols up to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

16 in the

CBDT format. It works in Android,

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

10 from 1607 including

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operati ...

, and in apps that support the

CBDT format. The Noto fonts cover 162 out of the 168 scripts defined in Unicode version 16.0 (released in September 2024), 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

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 contiguous 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 hexadecimal ...

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

alchemical Alchemy (from the Arabic word , ) is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first ...

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 a ...

s, numbers and letters enclosed in circles for lists, playing cards, domino and

Mahjong Mahjong (English pronunciation: ; also transliterated as mah jongg, mah-jongg, and mahjongg) is a tile-based game that was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. It is played ...

tiles, chess piece icons, Greek, Byzantine and regular musical symbols and arrow symbols. Among mathematical symbols, it includes

blackboard bold Blackboard bold is a style of writing Emphasis (typography), bold symbols on a blackboard by doubling certain strokes, commonly used in mathematical lectures, and the derived style of typeface used in printed mathematical texts. The style is most ...

glyphs, a mathematical sans-serif font modeled on

Helvetica Helvetica, also known by its original name 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 f ...

Fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly vis ...

and script fonts, hexagrams, and

Aegean numerals Aegean numbers was an additive Sign-value notation, sign-value numeral system used by the Minoan civilization, Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, Mycenaean civilizations. They are attested in the Linear A and Linear B scripts. They may have survived ...

. As of February 2025, the Noto fonts in the GitHub repository have this coverage of Unicode 16:

List of Noto fonts

As of February 2025, the following fonts exist:

Usage

Some projects provide a package for installing Noto fonts, e.g.

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an Open-source software, open source, rolling release Linux distribution. Arch Linux is kept up-to-date by regularly updating the individual pieces of software that it comprises. Arch Linux is intentionally minimal, and is meant ...

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to b ...

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for ...

CTAN C mathematical operations are a group of functions in the C standard library, standard library of the C programming language implementing basic mathematical functions. Different C standards provide different, albeit backwards-compatible, sets of ...

. Since version 6.0,

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

bundles Noto. Since 2019, ''Noto IKEA'', a customised version of Noto Sans, is a corporate typeface of

IKEA IKEA ( , ) is a Multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in Sweden that designs and sells , household goods, and various related services. IKEA is owned and operated by a series of not-for-profit an ...

. It is used in pair with standard versions of Noto Sans and they replaced Verdana as a corporate typeface.

References

External links

*
Noto
at

Google Fonts Google Fonts (formerly known as Google Web Fonts) is a computer font and web font service owned by Google. This includes Free-software license, free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and Applica ...

Noto Fonts
at

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

{{Free and open-source typography Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Free software Unicode typefaces Software using the Apache license Open-source typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2013 IPA typefaces Latin-script typefaces Cyrillic typefaces Arabic typefaces Hebrew typefaces Greek typefaces CJK typefaces