Noto on ChromeOS: No More “Tofu”

Every so often when reading a page written in a different language—especially Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (CJK) pages—you might see little boxes where letters should be, something that we call “tofu”. What's happened is that some of the characters are not supported by your computer. In July Google released Noto Sans CJK, the newest font in a family designed to cover 200+ languages in a harmonious way. As of Chrome OS 38, Noto is now the default sans serif and UI font for CJK languages.

Noto supports major living languages such as English, Russian, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as widely supported languages such as Cherokee and Sinhala, and even ancient languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Imperial Aramaic. The ultimate goal is for Noto to support every character for every language in the world—which will make tofu a thing of the past.

Noto has many advanced features:

• Pan-CJK: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all in a single font.
• Seven weights: Thin, Light, DemiLight, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black. ChromeOS has default support for Regular and Bold, with more coming soon.
• Free and open source: Freely available for everyone under the Apache License, v2.0.
• Comprehensive character coverage: Covers all the CJK Ideographs in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane and a few hundred Ideographs in Unicode Plane 2. Also covered are over twelve thousand Korean Hangul characters with full support for Old Hangul. The total number of glyphs in each font instance is exactly 65,536, the maximum number of glyphs allowed by the OpenType font specification. 
• Region-appropriate glyph forms: CJK-shared ideographic characters follow region writing conventions to look appropriate to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users. 
• Harmony: Noto Sans CJK and all other members of the Noto family are visually compatible with Noto Sans for English, so that text mixing English with another language looks harmonious.

In ChromeOS, Noto is now the default “sans serif” font. Developers that want to use Noto on platforms other than ChromeOS can load them as web fonts from Google Fonts: Early Access.

Although Noto's Latin, Greek, and Cryllic (LGC) characters are designed to harmonize with the CJK characters, developers might still want to use more familiar fonts for the LGC text. To support that, Noto is available in different subsets including Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and all of CJK. Developers can then use CSS's font fallback mechanism to specify a LGC font ahead of a Noto Sans subset.

For example, if you're targeting devices that don't have Noto installed, want to use Arial for LGC characters, and want to use Noto for Japanese characters, you can include the following in your stylesheet:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/earlyaccess/notosansjapanese.css); 

 body {

font-family: Arial, 'Noto Sans Japanese', sans-serif;

}

Shipping Noto by default on ChromeOS is one step towards making “tofu” a thing of the past. You can learn more at the Noto homepage.

Jungshik Shin, Font Harmony Master