Google’s beautiful new free font covers 800+ languages

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I would like a complete font set that has ALL the glyphs. I can do the subsetting.

AFAIR Adobe does sell such versions. Happy spending.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I certainly didn't ignore it, but downloading a subset of the font which contains the languages that the user commonly uses will be pretty pointless, because they're already going to have fonts on their device which contains those glyphs.

The benefit is that you can declare using Noto as font. Now if your book contains glyphs that the enduser doesn't have, and the font wasn't embedded, then you still know how the book is supposed to look like. I am not happy with how it happens in Windows that many fonts lack certain glyphs(arabic for example), and it gets substituted with the same default.

We need more and different styles of fonts or families that are complete and free.

[Doitsu]

BTW, Amazon has recently added Noto Sans Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu to the firmware of current Kindle models, which makes sense, since there's an Amazon India website that sells Kindles and Kindle books.

Unfortunately, they still haven't added Noto fonts for RTL languages (e.g. Noto Naskh Arabic and Noto Sans Hebrew).

Originally Posted by HarryT

Subsetting the complete font is beneficial in situations where you are using a small number of obscure glyphs in a book. Eg if I had a book in English which contained Egyptian hieroglyphs.

BTW, the size of the Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs font is only 294KB.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by GERGE

It was Apache, now it is OFL. There isn't really any practical differences.

The SIL OFL license was designed specifically for typography, and issues related to using fonts. For typographers, Google putting the NoTo fonts under the OFL license is a thing most welcome.

For general users, they won't have the unpleasant experience of discovering that their masterpiece can only be distributed under The GNU GPL 3.0, because, even though the underlying font was distributed under the Apache License, the font designer chose to include some GNU GPL 3.0 design code with their redesign.

Amber

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

a massive open source font family that spans more than 800 languages

To talk about the number of languages covered, is somewhat misleading.

The Latin Writing System, for example, can be used to write over 3,000 languages. However, L1 users of 90% of those languages probably won't be able to read their native language, when written with the Latin Writing System.

What one should describe, is the number of writing systems that a font covers, and how complete that coverage is.

Amber

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Unfortunately, they still haven't added Noto fonts for RTL languages (e.g. Noto Naskh Arabic and Noto Sans Hebrew

From

 www.google.com/get/noto/

:

• Noto Kufi Arab;
• Noto Naskh Arabic
• Noto Sans Hebrew

Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs font is only 294KB.

But where are the glyphs for the Phaistos Disc?

Amber

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

From

 www.google.com/get/noto/

:

• Noto Kufi Arab;
• Noto Naskh Arabic
• Noto Sans Hebrew

You might want to re-read my post. I know that these fonts exist, after all I specifically mentioned two of them by name in my post; I pointed out that Amazon didn't include these RTL fonts in the Kindle firmware.

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

But where are the glyphs for the Phaistos Disc?

Not surprisingly, they're in Noto Sans Symbols.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Here, I added some weight (15 with Fontforge) to Noto Serif for eInk: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bw...lY2SW1PV2JBTjg

Thanks GERGE, I tried this font on my Kobo for few hours, and I found it satisfactory and non straining on eyes. I can read comfortably for hours. This can very well replace the Bookerly on EInk devices with some weight adjustments suitable for individual eyes.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by drjd

This can very well replace the Bookerly on EInk devices with some weight adjustments suitable for individual eyes.

I agree. It is funny that Noto is available on Kindle considering Amazon and Google's past spats.

[Cyberman tM]

Interesting.
No klingon glyphs, though. Do'Ha'...

(Searching for klingon does give a result, but only links you to a latin script. Which makes sense, in a way, but I had hoped for klingon glyphs, even if they don't have an official unicode mapping...)

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Cyberman tM

Interesting.
No klingon glyphs, though. Do'Ha'...

Google didn't include Klingon, because in 2001 the Unicode Technical Committee rejected a proposal to inlcude Klingon (pIqaD).

Apparently there are more Star Trek fans at Microsoft, because Bing Translator supports Klingon and the pIqaD font created by Microsoft employee Shawn Steele can be downloaded for free.

BTW, eInk Kindle models support Klingon out of the box thanks to the Code2000 Unicode fallback font.

Both fonts use the same Private Use ranges (U+F8D0 - U+F8FF).

[Freeshadow]

It's a pity that the Sindarin fonts (Tolkien) had been pulled from circulation.

[GtrsRGr8]

I say it's good. Now maybe Google can concentrate next on making Google Play more user-friendly.