Does "noto sans" font support Chinese language? about noto-cjk

[XmlmXmlmX]

@jungshik I only found a japanese and korean version: Found ;)
Noto Sans JP (Japanese) https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+Japanese
Noto Sans KR (Korean) https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+KR
Noto Sans TC (Chinese Traditional) https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+TC
Noto Sans SC (Chinese Simplified) https://fonts.google.com/earlyaccess#Noto+Sans+SC

Added here an preview example: https://codepen.io/xmlmxmlmx/pen/bWwRoQ

[jungshik]

Actually, regional subsets of Noto Sans CJK are all available as web fonts at http://www.google.com/fonts/earlyaccess. They're not yet available via the main Google Font service.

[AlanCPSC]

How come Google doesn't offer a comprehensive version of Noto Sans ("Noto Sans Full")? Wouldn't this dramatically simplify life for developers?

[dougfelt]

Google fonts and the Noto fonts project are not the same. 'Noto Sans' is the latin (and greek and cyrillic) noto font. The CJK fonts aren't being served as web fonts yet, I think, at least not for production use.

Go to https://www.google.com/get/noto/ and search for 'Chinese', you'll see Noto Sans CJK TC/SC/KR/JP. These are the same as Adobe's Source Han Sans and have the same character repertoire.

[joomlagate]

Ok, understood now.
I will try to use Adobe's typekit on webpages.
Thank you.

2015-12-16 8:02 GMT+08:00 dougfelt [email protected]:

Google fonts and the Noto fonts project are not the same. 'Noto Sans' is
the latin (and greek and cyrillic) noto font. The CJK fonts aren't being
served as web fonts yet, I think, at least not for production use.

Go to https://www.google.com/get/noto/ and search for 'Chinese', you'll
see Noto Sans CJK TC/SC/KR/JP. These are the same as Adobe's Source Han
Sans and have the same character repertoire.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#53 (comment).

[joomlagate]

Thank you @jungshik , that is a great news.

[kenlunde]

@AlanCPSC Do you mean as in a single font that covers a large number of scripts and languages? If so, that's instantly a non-starter, because the glyph set for the Noto CJK fonts are already full, meaning at the architectural limit. Also, simpler fonts tend to function better. The best that could be done would be to package the fonts into a Font Collection, and the main benefit would be to reduce the number of font resources (aka files).

[NathanSweet]

@AlanCPSC As I understand, one font isn't possible because the same Unicode codepoints may need to look different for Korean vs Japanese vs Chinese users, etc.

[kenlunde]

@NathanSweet You might find the Source Han Sans ReadMe to be helpful. It covers Noto Sans CJK by virtue of being identical to Source Han Sans other than branding.

[AlanCPSC]

@kenlunde @NathanSweet Then how exactly do popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat (Android, IOS) handle the scenario for the user switching to Chinese or Japanese? Do they only package the latin alphabet font files and then dynamically load the Chinese ones in if they are selected through the network? What is the "standard" approach to dealing with this?

[kenlunde]

@AlanCPSC Modern OSes, to include mobile OSes, are bundled with fonts that cover a large number of scripts, including those for supporting East Asian languages, and provide a service called font fallback that uses fallback fonts to achieve this effect.

[AlanCPSC]

@kenlunde Thank you for your response. Regarding fallback fonts, do you know what font-weights are typically supported? I have noticed that different font typefaces usually have varying levels of granularity regarding font weight. For example, some support "medium" and "semibold", while others don't. Is there some sort of standard that specifies that every font must support at least [X weights]?

[kenlunde]

@AlanCPSC The degree of style/weight fidelity of font fallback depends on the environment. Distinguishing between Medium and Semibold would probably be a stretch for most of them. It really depends on what font attributes are taken into account. Besides the actual subfamily names (which typically include weight), the 'OS/2' table includes bit that specify the relative weight, and to some extent, the style. The extent to which these are accurately set depends on the type foundry.

In terms of a standard that dictates that every font must support a minimum number of weights, the answer is a definitive 'no'. Some typeface families may have only a single weight, and some have upwards of 10 or more.