Have you ever seen the little boxes on the web page indicating that your computer doesn’t have a font to display the text? They are referenced as “tofu,” a type of Chinese food known as bean curd. If so, it’s time to say goodbye to them.
About five years ago, Google started a project that focuses on designing a font to cover different languages all over the world. The original goal is to let devices that run Android and Chrome OS seamlessly support multiple languages with consistent font style. But in the end, Google released a font family called Noto, short for “no more tofu,” aiming to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.
Noto fully supports Unicode and has the fonts to support 800 languages and over 110,000 characters including a lot of special ones and emojis.
Even better, Note has multiple styles and weights and is freely available to everyone. No string attached. It’s free and open. The comprehensive set of fonts and tools used in our development is available in our GitHub repositories.
You can download the full package (about 472.6MB) that covers everything or only download the specific font package that supports the language you use. If you don’t see a font that supports your language, do a search by typing your language, region or font names in the search box.
You can install Noto Fonts not only on Windows but macOS and Linux as well.
To install Noto Fonts on Windows system,
- Download the font package (.zip)
- Extract the content into a folder
- Select all font files, right-click, and choose Install.
If you are a developer, you can also use Noto Fonts in your applications. Google has a guideline for using Noto for you as well.