Article | Google international team Xiangye Xiao and Jungshik Shin


Together with Adobe, we have fulfilled the user’s desire for Serif Serif fonts! We are pleased to announce the official launch of the highly anticipated Noto Serif CJK, which will be a companion font to the Noto Sans CJK released in 2014. Like Noto Sans CJK, Noto Serif CJK supports simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean in one font.



The serif CJK font is called 宋体 in mainland China, Ming ti in Hong Kong, macau and Taiwan, Ming dynasty in Japan and 명조 or 바탕 in South Korea. Both these terms and writing styles originated in China’s Song and Ming dynasties, when block printing was already popular in China. At that time people carved along the grain of wood. Horizontal strokes are easy to carve, vertical strokes are difficult; This results in thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes. In addition, triangles are added at the end of horizontal strokes in imitation of Chinese regular script calligraphy. This style is still used today, has become a common font style.

 

Serif fonts are considered more traditional and calligraphic, and are often used for longer text, such as the body text of a web page or e-book. Sans serif fonts are simpler and more modern, so they are often used in the interface and titles of websites/apps.


 

▲ Design of “yong” in Noto Serif and Sans CJK. The ideogram is famous for containing the most important elements of calligraphic strokes. It is often used to evaluate calligraphy or typographic design.

 

The Noto Serif CJK package has the same features as Noto Sans CJK:

  • It has full support for four language characters. This includes full support for CJK ideograms, as well as support for variant glyphs of the four regions, Kangxi radicals, Japanese kana, Korean characters, and other CJK symbols and letters in the Basic Multilingual plane of Unicode. It also provides limited support for CJK ideographs in the Second auxiliary plane of Unicode to support the Chinese and Japanese standards.

 

Simplified Chinese

Support GB 18030 and the latest Chinese standard “General Specification Chinese Character Table” issued in 2013.

Traditional Chinese

Support BIG5, traditional Chinese characters follow the Taiwan Ministry of Education standard font.

Japanese

Support for all kana in JIS X 0208, JIS X 0213 and JIS X 0212, covering all kana in Adobe-Japan1-6.

Korean

The best typography choice for Korean classics (such as Hunminjeongeum, which has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List) written in Korean and Chinese characters.

In addition to all the CJK ideograms in KS X 1001 and KS X 1002, more than 1.5 million ancient Korean syllables and 11,172 modern syllables are supported

▲ Noto Serif CJK supports standards for character and glyphs in four languages

 

  • It respects the diversity of writing conventions for the same character in different regions. The following example illustrates the four subtle variations of the “shu” in the four languages.



▲ From left to right are simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean “shu” glyphs. This character means “fast”.

 

  • It comes in seven different shades: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and Black. The Noto Serif CJK supports 43,027 encoded characters, containing 65,535 glyphs (the maximum number of glyphs a font can contain). In all, the seven thicknesses contain nearly half a million glyphs. These thickness are compatible with Google’s MaterialDesign standard font, Roboto, Noto Sans, and Noto Serif (the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic script in the Noto family).



▲ Seven thicknesses of NotoSerif CJK

 

  • It supports vertical text layout, following the Unicode vertical text layout standard. When text is written vertically, the shape, orientation, and position of specific characters (for example, parentheses and kana characters) are changed accordingly.




The workload of this project is very large and needs to rely on the strong support of experts around the country! Without the full support of the three large printing companies in east Asia (changzhou Chinese printing new technology co., LTD., IwataCorporation and sandol communications), the glyphs could not have been designed.

 

Noto Serif CJK under SIL Open Source font license, version 1.1 open source. We invite individual users to install and use these fonts in their favorite authoring applications; Hopefully developers will bundle these fonts with their apps, and hopefully original equipment manufacturers (Oems) will embed them into their devices. These fonts are free for all!

  • 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


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