Fulani speakers from West Africa have been provided with the first digital alphabet in their language, while there is even a version in Ogham, the Old Irish script used between the first and sixth centuries. To create the Tibetan characters, Monotype worked with Tibetan monks and Buddhist scholars. The project involved hundreds of researchers, designers, linguists, cultural experts and project managers around the world. For each language, Noto includes letters in multiple serif and sans serif styles across up to eight weights, as well as numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation. Google’s challenge was to create fonts for all of the 800 languages included in the Unicode Consortium standard for software internationalisation, which includes many little-spoken or so-called ‘dead’ languages, thus eradicating ‘tofu’ from our screens. ‘Tofu’ is the nickname used for the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website is unable to display a particular character because there is no font support for that language. The name, Noto, comes from Google’s initial brief to Monotype which was ‘no more tofu’. Some of the languages featured have never been digitised before and have only previously existed as inscriptions on stone or on ancient documents. In what is being billed as one of the largest typeface projects in human history, Google and Monotype have collaborated to create a unifying system that spans more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. This report by Patrick Burgoyne is a year old now, but has only recently come to my attention, and I thought I’d see what you people think (I’m sure those of you who know about typefaces have long been familiar with it):
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