Google has released a new open-source font called Noto, which hopes to eradicate the so-called “tofu” fonts -the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website can’t display a particular text.
Noto, an acronym for “No more tofu,” is the result of a five-year collaboration between Google, type-related technology company Monotype, Adobe and a network of volunteers. Noto supports the display of over 110,000 characters from 800 languages (including some of the dead ones).
Google says: “Beyond ‘no more tofu’ in the common languages used every day, Noto will 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.” Noto is now available to download for free.
