Go Noto Universal

Noto fonts go universal! Download Noto fonts combined to suit your region (South Asia, SE Asia,
Africa-MiddleEast, Europe-Americas).

This software combines/merges multiple Noto Fonts to a
single, region-specific font.

Download

If you simply want to use the fonts, go to Releases
page
and download what you need.

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

Build

If you want to build the fonts yourself, create a virtual environment (venv) and call ./run.sh.

python3 -m venv venv_fonty
source venv_fonty/bin/activate
./run.sh
deactivate

Font generation can take a few minutes to several hours, depending on your computer’s capabilities.
The Go Noto South Asia takes the longest time to generate.

run.sh 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:

CI

Dependencies

There is no dependency other than nototools and
fonttools. Both are automatically fetched and used.

Coverage

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

Regional font Coverage
GoNotoEuropeAmericas.ttf “Europe” – ch. 7, 8 and “Americas” – ch 20
GoNotoAfricaMiddleEast.ttf “Middle East” – ch. 9, 10, 11 and “Africa” – ch. 19
GoNotoSouthAsia.ttf “South and Central Asia” – ch. 12 and 13
GoNotoAsiaHistorical.ttf “South and Central Asia” – ch. 14 and 15
GoNotoSouthEastAsia.ttf “Southeast Asia” – ch. 16 and “Indonesia and Ocenia” – ch 17
GoNotoCJKCore2005.ttf Unihan IICore subset of CJK (~10K ideographs). Use Noto CJK for full coverage
GoNotoEastAsia.ttf “East Asia” – ch 18. everything other than Han (CJK)

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

Urdu (NotoNastaliq), though not written in an Indic script and not part of “South Asia” chapters in
the Unicode spec, is included for practical reasons. Mongolian is currently not included because of
issue with vmtx (vertical metrics). Noto fonts do not exist for Toto and Tangsa.

Go Noto Asia Historical

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

Nandinagari is currently not included. Noto fonts do not exist for Dives Akuru and Ottoman Siyaq
Numbers. An older version of NotoSansDogra is included.

Go Noto South East Asia

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

Noto fonts do not exist for Makasar.

Go Noto Europe Americas

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

Go Noto Africa Middle East

The following are included: Arabic (Naskh-style), Adlam, Avestan, Bamum, Bassa Vah, Cuneiform,
Hebrew, Syriac, Samaritan, Mandaic, Yezidi, Old North Arabian, Old South Arabian, Phoenician,
Imperial Aramaic, Manichaean, Inscriptional Parthian, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Psalter Pahlavi,
Elymaic, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Hatran, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Egyptian, Meroitic, Anatolian
Hieroglyphics.

Noto fonts do not exist for Chorasmian.

Go Noto East Asia

Tibetan, Lisu, Marchen, Miao, Yi, etc. excluding Han/CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean).

Mongolian, Nüshu and Tangut could not be included.

Go Noto CJK Core 2005

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.

The GoNotoCJKCore2005 includes “locl” features, so it can display Japanese or Korean glyphs just by
switching the language in your editor/word processor/web browser etc.

The generated font does not contain Noto Sans Math, Noto Sans Symbols, Noto Sans Symbols 2 because
fonttools does not support merging fonts
with CFF outlines (which is the case for .otf). Converting .otf to .ttf still doesn’t solve the
problem because CJK fonts have “vmtx” table, which is absent in other fonts, thus preventing
pyftmerge.

Font Statistics

Statistics below correspond to release v2.2.

Regional font Code blocks Codepoints Glyphs
GoNotoEuropeAmericas.ttf 111 11896 14780
GoNotoAfricaMiddleEast.ttf 125 15506 19750
GoNotoSouthAsia.ttf 114 10955 20974
GoNotoAsiaHistorical.ttf 114 10261 16767
GoNotoSouthEastAsia.ttf 107 10168 14358
GoNotoEastAsia.ttf 96 10559 15357
GoNotoCJKCore2005.ttf 20 10338 20099

Note that each of the above (except CJKCore2005) include statistics of:

Upstream font Code blocks Codepoints Glyphs
Noto Sans 37 blocks 2840 codepoints 3317 glyphs
Noto Sans Math 22 blocks 2472 codepoints 2655 glyphs
Noto Sans Symbols 15 blocks 840 codepoints 1218 glyphs
Noto Sans Symbols 2 37 blocks 2655 codepoints 2674 glyphs
Total 111 blocks 8807 codepoints 9864 glyphs

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. Certain fonts just refuse to cooperate, e.g. Mongolian, Nushu.

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 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, basically same as this repo).

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

GitHub

View Github