notofonts/noto-cjk

The About information some Noto Sans on Google Fonts seems to be inaccurate.

Opened this issue · 2 comments

artsyhugh commented

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Title

The About information some Noto Sans on Google Fonts seems to be inaccurate.

Font

All fonts in the following families: Noto Sans/Serif, Noto Sans/Serif Japanese/Korean/Hong Kong/Traditional Chinese/Simplified Chinese

Where the font came from, and when

Google Fonts, July 2024

Issue

I tried asking this at https://groups.google.com/g/googlefonts-discuss, hoping to get a more direct answer from the approriate community, but I haven't gotten a response in quite some time. I figured that since the project is maintained here, somebody here might be responsible for updating About information.

The About information some Noto Sans seems to be inaccurate:

  • Inconsitent font names: this font is called both "Noto Sans Hong Kong" and "Noto Sans CJK Hong Kong." Same problem for the JP, KR, TC and SC fonts.
  • Inaccurate glyph counts: the JP, KR, HK, TC and SC fonts are all said to contain 65,535 glyphs. I don't remember exactly, but this may have been the case when their names still contained "CJK," during which I vaguely remember how large the font files were. But this does not appear to be the case NOW. I opened these with FontLab 8 and High-Logic FontCreator 15 and they both showed the glyph count for each font was much lower than that. Noto Serif JP, for example, only contains 17,803 glyphs. Noto Sans and Serif (non-CJK), on the other hand, contain MORE than 3,741 glyphs as claimed on their About pages; the actual glyph count for Noto Sans is 4664.
  • Inaccurate info on supported blocks: I did not find a single glyph from the Hangul Syllables block in Noto Sans JP, even though it is said to support that block.
  • Inaccurate OpenType feature counts: I'm not 100% confident with this, since the programs I used to open these fonts, FontLab and FontCreator, may have altered this information as they attempted to read the font files. But what they showed didn't match what's claimed on About pages. It'd be great if there's info on the exact features so I could cross-check.
punchcutter commented

All of this changed without much explanation anywhere, but the short answer for the names is that we introduced variable fonts and Google Fonts dropped the "CJK" fonts. Google Fonts used to only serve the static fonts and those have been swapped out with the variable fonts. And since the subset versions are smaller it makes more sense to serve those because in the end that should give anybody the benefit of faster loading even if using more than one region. There are still two versions available in this repo with the full set of glyphs (65535) or the subset version for each region. It has always been a little confusing for everyone to have multiple versions so it's maybe better for some users to have this simpler setup. If you really need the CJK version with 65535 glyphs you can download it from this repo, but for most situations the subsets served by Google Fonts should suffice.

Because these are the subsets the descriptions are wrong as you found out. The detailed information about everything is in https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-sans/blob/release/SourceHanSansReadMe.pdf and https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif/blob/release/SourceHanSerifReadMe.pdf

@chrissimpkins @davelab6 Who edits those pages like https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+JP/about ?