SAYING NOTO TOFU: Google releases open source font Noto to eliminate the tofu problem.

You may not have heard of the tofu problem, but you have almost certainly experienced it. If you visit a website or open a document that can’t display a particular character, you’ll see a white box symbol resembling a cube of tofu. Now Google has a solution.

The Noto font project (it’s a mashup of ‘NO more TOfu’) has been something of a labor of love, taking five years to reach its conclusion. But the result is an open source Noto font family which Google says includes “every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters”.

It’s an ambitious project, cleverly executed, and if you’re interested at all in fonts and typefaces you’ll want to read the whole thing.

You can download the Noto font here, free of charge.