Adobe has been known to work on different types of fonts over the years and Google of course is always ready to work on anything new and exciting. A few years back, Google and Adobe joined hands to launch a new open source Font based on Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. It was a Sans Serif Fonts and today the two companies would like to expand the Font family to include Serif CJK Fonts also.
Google will call this CJK Font Noto Serif CJK Font and Adobe plans to call it Han Serif CJK Font. One might wonder what took them so long to come up with the Serif version of the Non serif font. So it was in no way a small task. The fonts included in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean font family include a total of 65535 glyphs (and it also contain Cyrillic, Greek and Latin glyphs) now the formation of these glyphs is also a complex structures and they are available in seven different weights. So we are talking about a total of 450,000 glyphs. With this huge number and the complexity of the structure of the font, it took sometime to come up with both the serif and sans-serif of CJK fonts.
The Han Serif is also optimized for screen just like its predecessor. As it is an open source font, you can find the font files on GitHub under the open source license.
While Adobe wants to develop this font because of the large number of documents in this font will be able to use it, Google’s main attraction is to use the font for Android devices, especially the smartphones. There is a huge market of android based smartphones that prefers CJK languages for mobiles. Any advancement in the field of CJK fonts by Google will be directly proportional to the company’s popularity of Android based devices.
Have you used any CJK Fonts? Share your views by commenting below.
