Posted by Xiangye Xiao and Jungshik Shin, Internationalization Engineering
team
Today, in collaboration with Adobe, we are responding to the call for Serif! We
are pleased to announce Noto Serif CJK, the long-awaited companion to
Noto
Sans CJK released in 2014. Like Noto Sans CJK, Noto Serif CJK supports
Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all in one font.
A serif-style CJK font goes by many names:
Song (宋体) in Mainland China,
Ming (明體) in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan,
Minchō
(明朝) in
Japan, and
Myeongjo (명조) or
Batang (바탕) in Korea.
The names
and writing styles originated during the Song and Ming dynasties in China, when
China's wood-block printing technique became popular. Characters were carved
along the grain of the wood block. Horizontal strokes were easy to carve and
vertical strokes were difficult; this resulted in thinner horizontal strokes and
wider vertical ones. In addition, subtle triangular ornaments were added to the
end of horizontal strokes to simulate Chinese Kai (楷体) calligraphy. This style
continues today and has become a popular typeface style.
Serif fonts, which are considered more traditional with calligraphic aesthetics,
are often used for long paragraphs of text such as body text of web pages or
ebooks. Sans-serif fonts are often used for user interfaces of websites/apps and
headings because of their simplicity and modern feeling.
 |
| Design of '永' ('eternity')
in Noto Serif and Sans CJK. This ideograph is famous for having the most important elements of
calligraphic strokes. It is often used to evaluate calligraphy or typeface
design. |
The Noto Serif CJK package offers the same features as Noto Sans CJK:
- It has comprehensive character coverage for the four languages. This
includes the full coverage of CJK Ideographs with variation support for four
regions, Kangxi radicals, Japanese Kana, Korean Hangul and other CJK symbols and
letters in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. It also provides a
limited coverage of CJK Ideographs in Plane 2 of Unicode, as necessary to
support standards from China and Japan.
Simplified Chinese
|
Supports GB 18030 and China’s latest standard Table of
General Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表) published in 2013.
|
Traditional Chinese
|
Supports BIG5, and Traditional Chinese glyphs are
compliant to glyph standard of Taiwan Ministry of Education (教育部國字標準字體).
|
Japanese
|
Supports all of the kanji in JIS X 0208, JIS X
0213, and JIS X 0212 to include all kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6.
|
Korean
|
Supports over 1.5 million archaic Hangul syllables and
11,172 modern syllables as well as all CJK ideographs in KS X 1001 and KS X
1002
|
Noto Serif CJK’s support of character and glyph set
standards for the four languages
- It respects diversity of regional writing conventions for
the same
character. The example below shows the four glyphs of '述' (describe) in four
languages that have subtle differences.
 |
| From left to right are
glyphs of '述' in S. Chinese, T. Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This character means
"describe". |
- It is offered in seven weights: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium,
SemiBold, Bold, and Black. Noto Serif CJK supports 43,027 encoded characters and
includes 65,535 glyphs (the maximum number of glyphs that can be included in a
single font). The seven weights, when put together, have almost a half-million
glyphs. The weights are compatible with Google's Material Design standard fonts, Roboto, Noto Sans and Noto Serif
(Latin-Greek-Cyrillic fonts in the Noto family).
Seven weights of
Noto Serif CJK
- It supports vertical text layout and is compliant with the
Unicode vertical text layout
standard. The shape, orientation, and position of particular characters
(e.g., brackets and kana letters) are changed when the writing direction of
the text is vertical.
The sheer size of this project also required regional expertise! Glyph design
would not have been possible without leading East Asian type foundries Changzhou
SinoType Technology,
Iwata
Corporation, and
Sandoll
Communications.
Noto Serif CJK is open source under the
SIL Open
Font License, Version 1.1. We invite individual users to install and use
these fonts in their favorite authoring apps; developers to bundle these fonts
with your apps, and OEMs to embed them into their devices. The fonts are free
for everyone to use!
Noto Serif CJK font download:
https://www.google.com/get/noto
Noto Serif CJK on GitHub:
https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-cjk
Adobe's landing page for this release:
http://adobe.ly/SourceHanSerif
Source Han Serif on GitHub:
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif/tree/release/
