Google Noto fonts

I saw a couple of articles today about Google releasing some open source fonts, called Noto. I decided to make myself useful and convert them to RISC OS format.

You can download the Latin fonts from here. Install them using Configure/Fonts.

At this stage I’ve only done the Latin fonts. I’d like to convert the Japanese font too, but it looks like a big one so no promises!

[Download updated 11 Oct 8:50 AM GMT; original download was missing the Mono font.]

Interesting that they have released the different scripts in separate files. Do they have any glyphs in common, and if so, will those glyphs be identical? It would make most sense, for RISC OS, for all the possible glyphs to be in a single font, but I am not sure how easy that would be to achieve with current conversion tools.

The problem there is that the “same” character can look different depending on the language. For example, Wikipedia tells me that the radical for “grass” has three strokes in simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean but four strokes in traditional Chinese. The characters are still at the same Unicode code points but are rendered differently depending on the language, hence a different font for each language.

If you want to research this, it’s known as “han unification”.