Google has taken on its fair share of ambitious projects — digitizing millions and millions of books, mapping the whole world, pioneering self-driving cars. It's a company that doesn't shy away from grand plans.
But one recent effort, despite its rather lofty scope, has escaped much notice. The company is working on a font that aims to include "all the world's languages" — every written language on Earth.
"Tofu" is what the pros call those tiny, empty rectangles that show up when a script isn't supported. This is where Google's new font family, "Noto," gets its name: "No Tofu."
Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world — specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts — the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive.
But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated — and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.
'Internationalizing' The Internet
It all started with the Unicode Consortium — a non-profit for the "internationalization" of the Internet — which kicked off the research into language fonts in 1987. It started work on what was called the Unicode Standard — a "character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world."
Even when more widely-spoken languages are supported, their scripts may not accurately reflect the culture within which they're used. Urdu is one example.
Being from the South, Ali Eteraz loves William Faulkner's work, but as Pakistani-American, he is also a fan of Mirza Ghalib, whose influence on the Urdu language is often compared to Shakespeare's influence on English. But between Faulkner and Ghalib, Eteraz could only share Faulkner's works online.
The problem is that the nastaliq Urdu used for Ghalib's verses — ornate and calligraphic with distinctive hanging characters — is not supported. So Eteraz and others who want to share poetry written in the gorgeous script have to upload snapshots instead of being able to merely copy and paste. "People even e-mail entire books to each other, in individual images," Eteraz wrote in an October 2013 essay.
"Constantly uploading image files to communicate may be romantic (or it can make you feel like a second-class digital citizen), but it is not practical," he wrote.