Noto unified font

Philippe Verdy verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
Sat Oct 8 23:21:32 CDT 2016


2016-10-09 2:20 GMT+02:00 James Kass <jameskasskrv at gmail.com>:

> Philippe Verdy wrote,
>
> > Technically it is not a single font but a coherent collection of fonts
> made
> > specifically for each script ...
>
> In a constantly changing world, it should be a pleasant experience to
> be reminded that some things remain constant.
>
> Whether the Noto font family is released as one file or many, it seems that
> somebody considers it a worthwhile endeavor.
>

The major reason there are several fonts and not just one is because not
all scripts have the same variants and styles (and it's not a defect of the
design). And there are different requirements for example allowing choosing
preferences between color or monochrmatic emojis, using standard (narrow)
Latin from Noto Sans, or wider variants of Latin for CJK: in a stylesheet
you can still customize the order even if Noto Sans will be part of all
sets of families. Some variants don't make sens at all for Arabic
(sans-serif and serif, but are replaced by two traditional variants of the
script); monospaced fonts are also not available for Arabic (they exist but
are extremely poor), or many Indic scripts. The purpose is not to invent
new designs but present designs that are easily read and convenient for
each script (and that's why there are also more weights in the CJK fonts;
for Latin additional weights way be directly infered from the two stadnard
weights, may be later there will be Latin/Greek/Cyrillic with more weights,
but the need was less urgent than for CJK due to its complexity to make it
readable and still preserve a coherent overall blackness/contrast).

May be some fonts in this set could be merged, e.g. the Cherokee font could
be merged with the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic font.
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