Google releases open-source multilingual font

Google has announced the release of a new open-source font called Noto that supports 800 languages and covers 110 writing systems. Noto, short for ‘No more Tofu’, has been a five-year long project to address the issue of the default white box (dubbed Tofu) that appears when a computer doesn’t recognize a character on a website. Regardless of which language an individual creates or consumes digital content in, there should be no ‘unknown’ characters that come across as white boxes. The project was the result of a partnership with experts in the field of type and font design. Noto can also be used to preserve the history and culture of rare languages through digitization. As new characters are introduced into the Unicode standard, Google will add these into the Noto font family. It is possible to download Noto here.