Noto adds CJK, plus new user-facing website

[Philippe Verdy]

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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