6th October 2016

No more tofu – how Monotype and Google broke the language barrier

– by Anthony Leyton

Computers are very clever, but they don’t speak Tibetan very well. Or Manichean. Or Old Hungarian. Or Linear A. Or any of the hundreds of languages, both living and dead, that depend upon out-of-the-ordinary character sets. At least, they didn’t until today.

For the last five years, the type designers of Monotype and the tech giants of Google have been working together to banish tofu from the web. It’s not that they dislike bean curd per se – those little white squares that a computer throws up whenever it doesn’t have the right font to hand earned the nickname ‘tofu’ from Japanese web users, and it quickly caught on worldwide. Google wanted rid of the stuff, and it called upon Monotype – the only company with enough expertise in type design and sufficient experience of developing new typeface families – to do it.

Noto (‘No more tofu’) is the result – a family of typefaces specifically created to give those long-neglected languages a digital presence for the first time, to make the web less annoying, and to preserve the written history of minority cultures that might otherwise be lost forever. The 100 or so scripts Monotype designed for Noto can support around 800 languages – including every one specified in the latest Unicode standard – and the list will only keep on growing, until every language and writing system in human history has a typeface to accommodate it.

That kind of ambition takes more than a few evenings working late. This film tells the story of the making of Noto, and the hundreds of designers, linguists, cultural experts and Buddhist monks (yes really), who helped bring about the biggest and most wide-ranging step change in the history of type…