Its widespread use will cut down on that pesky ransom note effect, allowing products to maintain a consistent design across languages and interfaces. Google and Adobe are making Noto Serif CJK free and open source. Around 7,000 character files work for all four scripts. In the end, the type designers only had to draw 270 separate glyphs for each of the four scripts. The more shared glyphs, the better for the font's file size and the smaller the file size, the faster Source Han Sans and Noto Serif CJK can load for its users. “If you follow the regional conventions, it tells a user that you’ve designed a product for them, and not just repurposed for their language.” Lunde, the author of two books on the letterforms of East Asian languages, was in charge of mapping which characters in CJK scripts were shared and which required a unique deign. “If you don’t preserve these conventions in the characters, say if you used this Simplified Chinese version of the glyph and presented it to a Japanese speaker, it gives the document a non-Japanese feeling,” says Ken Lunde, a linguist and computer scientist at Adobe. Developing a universal CJK font that evokes the same look and feel as, say, Times New Roman, is very hard to do. Those languages contain tens of thousands of characters versus the mere dozens you find in Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It's a major hurdle for designers who work with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) scripts.
“When you take two fonts and mix them together, you’ll see that the characters don’t look right together,” says Bob Jung, Google’s director of internationalization efforts.
Noto Serif CJK is a gift to anyone who builds products in multiple languages. Crafting it was no small feat: Google partnered with Adobe and worked with five international type foundries to design thousands of letterforms that are authentic to each culture, yet still manage to look unmistakably related. It looks consistent across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, as well as English, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. But Noto Serif CJK, which the company unveiled today, is unique in its utility. Google Fonts, the company's archive of free, open source fonts, lists more than 800 typographic designs.
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