Go Noto Universal

Noto Fonts go universal! Did you ever want "one font for all languages"? Download pan-Unicode, Noto Fonts merged according to the time of usage (current, ancient) or geographical region (Africa-MiddleEast, Europe-Americas, South Asia, SE Asia).

We offer two types of combined fonts:

1. Time-based:
   • GoNotoKurrent covers pretty much all the scripts in current, widespread use all over the world. This is designed to be a "good enough" font for modern, living scripts without being exhaustive.
   • GoNotoAncient covers all the historical, obsolete and liturgical scripts.
2. Region-based:
   Choose a single font based on where you live or whichever region you're interested in: Africa - Middle East, East Asia, Europe - Americas, South Asia or South East Asia.

See caveats too.

Download

If you simply want to use the fonts, go to Releases page and download what you need. If you're unsure what to download, you probably need GoNotoKurrent-Regular.ttf¹. If you want better support for emoji and symbols, try GoNotoCurrent-Regular.ttf. A bold variant of the font is also available (-Bold.ttf).

Development builds are available from GitHub Actions page. Click on any workflow with green checkmark ✅ (pipeline passed) and under "Artifacts", download "GoNotoTemporalFonts.zip" and "GoNotoRegionalFonts.zip" (login required).

NOTE: Even if there are no regular commits to this repo, the CI pipeline builds new Go Noto fonts everyday, pulling the latest Noto Fonts from upstream (using a scheduled cron). So, download the "Artifacts" from the "Actions" page to get the best features and bug fixes from Noto Fonts.

Build

If you want to build the fonts yourself, create a virtual environment (venv) and run the script you want:

python3 -m venv venv_fonty
source venv_fonty/bin/activate
./temporal_fonts.sh  # generates GoNotoAncient.ttf and GoNotoCurrent.ttf
./regional_fonts.sh  # generates GoNoto[AfricaMiddleEast|EuropeAmericas|...].ttf
deactivate

Font generation can take 15 to 30 min, depending on your computer's capabilities.

Each script is designed to be reentrant, so you can run it multiple times without altering the working state of the repository or downloading stuff again and again.

Latest CI status:

Dependencies

fonttools is automatically fetched and used. The main programs we use are pyftmerge, pyftsubset and ttx.

Coverage

Temporal Fonts

Temporal, i.e., time-based fonts are:

• Go Noto Kurrent -- combines 80+ Noto Fonts of scripts which are in current, daily usage. It is a superset of all the "Regional Fonts" (see below) excluding historical or specialty fonts. It includes support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) too, using the Unihan IICore subset.
• Go Noto Ancient -- combines 70+ Noto Fonts of ancient, historical or liturgical scripts which are not used widely today. This font is probably useful for research or scholarly purposes or language enthusiasts. This font does not support any CJK.

Each of these fonts includes Noto Sans (Regular), Noto Sans Symbols, Noto Sans Symbols 2, Noto Sans Math and Noto Music so that notations, symbols and emoji are not missed out.

Serif variants of these are also included but their Unicode coverage is not as good as Sans Serif (lack of upstream Noto Serif fonts).

The exact fonts which are combined are too long to list here but can be seen from the source code.

Regional Fonts

These fonts are merged/combined as per the regions defined in the Unicode Standard (pdf). Chapter numbers below refer to that spec.

Each of the above fonts includes LGC (Latin-Greek-Cyrillic) as default, same coverage as Noto Sans Regular. Each one also includes Noto Sans Math, Noto Music, Noto Sans Symbols and Noto Sans Symbols 2 to give you bonus coverage of beautiful notations, symbols and emoji :)

Go Noto South Asia

Following are included: Bengali, Chakma, Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, etc), Gondi, Gujarati, Gunjala Gondi, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Lepcha, Limbu, Malayalam, Masaram Gondi, Meetei Mayek, Mro, Nag Mundari, Newa, Ol Chiki, Oriya, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Saurashtra, Sinhala, Tamil, Tangsa, Telugu, Thaana, Tibetan, Toto, Wancho, Warang Citi.

Urdu (Noto Naskh Arabic), though not written in an Indic script and not part of "South Asia" chapters in the Unicode spec, is included for practical reasons. Noto Nastaliq Urdu would be more appropriate but it is too big to fit in the merged font.

Go Noto Asia Historical

Following are included: Ahom, Bhaiksuki, Brahmi, Dives Akuru, Dogra, Grantha, Indic Siyaq Numbers, Kaithi, Kharoshthi, Khojki, Khudawadi, Mahajani, Makasar, Modi, Multani, Nag Mundari, Nandinagari, Old Sogdian, Old Turkic, Old Uyghur, Ottoman Siyaq Numbers, Phags-Pa, Sharada, Siddham, Sogdian, Sora Sompeng, Soyombo, Syloti Nagri, Takri, Tirhuta, Zanabazar Square.

Go Noto South East Asia

Following are included: Balinese, Batak, Buginese, Buhid, Cham, Hanifi Rohingya, Hanunóo, Javanese, Kayah Li, Kawi, Khmer, Lao, Makasar, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, Nyiakeng Puache Hmong, Pahawh Hmong, Pau Cin Hau, Rejang, Sundanese, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Thai.

Go Noto Europe Americas

Everything covered by NotoSans (Latin-Greek-Cyrillic etc.) plus Anatolian Hieroglyphics, Armenian, Braille, Canadian Aboriginal, Carian, Caucasian Albanian, Cherokee, Coptic, Cypriot, Deseret, Duployan, Elbasan, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Linear A, Linear B, Lycian, Lydian, Mayan Numerals, Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong, Ogham, Old Hungarian, Old Italic, Old Permic, Osage, Runic, Shavian, Sutton Sign Writing, Vithkuqi.

Go Noto Africa Middle East

The following are included: Adlam, Anatolian Hieroglyphics, Arabic (Naskh-style), Avestan, Bamum, Bassa Vah, Chorasmian, Cuneiform, Egyptian, Elymaic, Ethiopic, Hatran, Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Mandaic, Manichaean, Medefaidrin, Mende Kikakui, Meroitic, Nabataean, N'Ko, Old North Arabian, Old Persian, Old South Arabian, Osmanya, Palmyrene, Phoenician, Psalter Pahlavi, Samaritan, Sumero-Akkadian, Syriac, Tifinagh, Ugaritic, Vai, Yezidi.

Go Noto East Asia

Bopomofo, Hangul, Hiragana and Katakana, Khitan Small Script, Lisu, Marchen, Miao, Mongolian, Nüshu, Tangut, Tibetan, Yi, etc. excluding Han/CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean). Vertical text writing is not supported.

Go Noto CJK Core

Unihan IICore is a minimal, region-agnostic subset of Han/CJK specified in 2005 for memory-constrained systems. It standardizes about 9800 codepoints, covering basic use cases of Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Japanese and Korean. Recently Unihan Core 2020 superseded and expanded the minimal subset to about 20000 codepoints. Go Noto CJK Core includes a superset of codepoints from both of these subsets.

The GoNotoCJKCore.ttf includes "locl" layout feature, so it can display Japanese or Korean glyphs just by switching the language in your editor/word processor/web browser etc. Hiragana, Katakana and Hangul are included.

Why use this instead of the upstream Noto CJK Fonts? Because our font also contains Noto Sans Math, Noto Music, Noto Sans Symbols, Noto Sans Symbols 2, plus everything in Noto Sans (Regular) -- so you can have emojis, mathematical notation, musical symbols and Latin-Greek-Cyrillic in a single font. But all the upstream Noto CJK Fonts have maxed out 65K glyphs, so they don't have space anymore for glyphs additions.

The only limitation is that Go Noto CJK Core does not support vertical text writing.

Font Statistics

Font statistics are collected in tsv format (tab separated value) by the CI pipeline in every run and can be downloaded in build Artifacts.

Statistics below correspond to release v5.1.

NotoSansSignWriting alone contributes about 37900 glyphs to GoNotoEuropeAmericas.ttf.

Note that each of the above include statistics of:

Caveats

1. You might have to increase line spacing or line margins in your application to avoid some characters appearing "clipped". This is because many Asian scripts stack letters vertically (e.g. Indic scripts, Thai, Balinese etc.) but the line metrics of the merged font are optimized for LGC.
2. Tibetan has limited glyphs, otherwise GSUB table gets "overflow"ed. Only the most frequently occuring "subjoined consonants" are included. Those characters are displayed ok, but just that the glyphs appear to be "pushed up" compared to their neighbours.
3. Vertical text layout is not supported for CJK, Dogra, Mongolian, Nandinagari, Nüshu and Tangut, even though the upstream Noto Fonts has the support because fonttools does not support merging with vmtx/vhea.
4. Go Noto Kurrent has limited support for CJK -- it offers the full Unihan IICore subset plus more glyphs, so it should work ok-ish for daily use but there can be missing glyphs. As before, vertical text writing is not supported with this font.
5. Duployan has limited glyphs, also to avoid GSUB overflow. Cursive connections, contextual forms, and overlap trees are disabled. Shading and combining marks still work.

License

In the spirit of loka-saṃgraha, the scripts distributed in this git repository (the "Software") are dedicated to the public domain as per "The Unlicense". See UNLICENSE.txt.

However, the fonts generated by using the Software are licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, as required by the upstream Noto Fonts Project.

Others

FontTools package comes with nice utilities ttx (ttf to xml and back), pyftsubset (create font with subset of given font) and pyftmerge (merging fonts, the workhorse of this repo).

libharfbuzz-bin offers CLI utilities hb-view and hb-shape which are useful for visualising rendered characters.

otfinfo gives useful info about glyphs, codepoints, scripts and more.