Noto adds CJK, plus new user-facing website

[Roozbeh Pournader]

The Noto Sans Symbols font already supports a lot of the symbol classes you
mentioned. Linear B and Runic are also supported by Noto. Same with some of
the newer experimental scripts (Osmanya, Deseret, Shavian, etc.)

HarfBuzz has been trying its best to support ever character in Unicode as
soon as possible. It is included in Android, ChromeOS, and I believe all
modern Linux distributions.

And last not the least, both HarfBuzz and Noto would appreciate any help in
finding and fixing issues they may have. The bug fix turnaround is usually
very quick, especially with HarfBuzz.


On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Thanks to get it known.
>
> Probably the Noto collection is the best drop in replacement for Android
> smartphones and tablets. And they will be useful to many websites. They
> will also fit very well with Linux distribs.
>
> Apple could feature the Adobe collection for MacOSX. Will Microsoft follow
> with a comparable collection for Windows?
>
> For languages like Burmese and languages of Africa this is a great
> announcement. Tibetan script still lacks some complete support (and Divehi
> as well even if it is much simpler than Arabic; but really ugly in existing
> fonts).
>
> Next step: building monospaced variants of these fonts for use in
> programmng languages and coding. Or may be just integrate a feature in
> these fonts to support a monospaced rendering (using one or several
> fixed-width cells in a row for each cluster), or facilitating data input
> with easier placement of input carets and easier text selection (the
> alternative being to use simplified glyphs and simpler joiners for cursive
> scripts, at least temporarily for the word under focus or an input tool
> showing the simplified rendering in a small window working like a magnifier
> when hovering some scripts with complex layouts; that tool could work also
> with IMEs; that alternative would deprecate monospace styles for many
> scripts where they are really ugly and not very easy to read fast, glyphs
> would be rendered with more natural sizes and positioning and more regular
> stroke weights).
>
> After that, this will be the turn for a comprehensive font for Maths
> formulas and pictograms for technical diagrams, and a font for pictograms
> (meteorology, astrology, games, cartographic symbols, arrows, clocks
> showing time, UI symbols, agendas, musical notations, emojis)
>
> And some other for old historic scripts (Linear A or B, old runic
> scripts), and experiments with new experimental scripts developed in the
> last half-century or just since the apparition of personal computers in the
> early 1980s (coincides with radical changes about how books/papers and
> other medias showing text are produced, with radical changes in
> orthographies for the remaining minority languages).
>
> The global public is just starting to rediscover the beauty of the
> historic scripts and how they could also be useful to complement their
> native alphabets that have suffered a lot since the advent of ASCII or
> early 8bit charsets in computers everywhere and the early development of
> Unicode and incompaticle charsets showing unreadable random results or just
> tofu (even today or modern languages like Burmese, or with "optional"
> diacritics rendered on the wrong letters in Russian with most commonly
> installed fonts).
>
> Another for SignWriting with specific features (if it is possible to
> design it to work with a stable orthographic convention for the layout,
> otherwise develop a standard layout UI control, or a simple schema for use
> in basic HTML or UI, rendering it with a subset of SVG using a set of
> component glyphs from a common font and a standard mapping).
>
> Let's just hope that OSes will support all these new scripts (Windows has
> always been leaving users behind if they did not use the lastest version
> whose linguistic support was frozen at least 2 years before the last
> release, with few extensions with OS or Office service packs, notably for
> the OpenType, GDI, 3D API, or .Net renderers and in i18n support APIs).
>
>
>
> 2014-07-16 1:33 GMT+02:00 Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at unicode.org>:
>
>> Please excuse the spam, but I think it would be interesting for people
>> here to know that the Noto open source project now supports CJK, which
>> brings it very close to the goal of supporting every major script (and
>> several minor and historical ones).
>>
>> Here is the CJK announcement:
>>
>> http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2014/07/noto-cjk-font-that-is-complete.html
>>
>> Here is the new user-oriented Noto website:
>> http://www.google.com/get/noto/
>>
>> The data on the website is from the CLDR project, and the sample images
>> are rendered using HarfBuzz and Pango.
>>
>> And more will be coming. (Of all the scripts used for CLDR languages,
>> only three have not been released yet.)
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> CLDR-Users mailing list
>> CLDR-Users at unicode.org
>> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/cldr-users
>>
>>
>
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