Including Latin Core / other subsets in releases

[amirdavidy]

Hi guys,

The Hebrew version of Noto Sans doesn't have the latin/english characters, numbers and comma sign embedded. so it is impossible to use it for bilingual text. Can you fix that and embed all the characters, heberw+latin inside the hebrew font?

[simoncozens]

This is deliberate; a single Noto font is not expected to be able to render all characters in a document. Noto fonts should be used in a document processing environment where font fallback is available.

[amirdavidy]

Thank you so much!

I design all the marketing materials for both Google and YouTube in Israel. It is impossible for me to use the Hebrew font without having digits, commas and latin letters embedded to it as well. In Adobe products such as Illustrator or Indesign, I now have to go through every character that's missing, one-by-one, and change it from default font to Noto Sans. It's quite a nightmare to work like this... Are you sure you can't help me in some way?

[simoncozens]

There is a plan to provide a merged "mega font" with all the Noto scripts in one font, or at least per-region subsets. And when Noto fonts get onboarded to Google Fonts / Google Docs / etc. they will need to have a core Latin set. So this will all happen at some point. I also wonder if it might not be a bad idea to make a web site where people can build and download their own merged fonts for the scripts they need.

But at the "source" side it doesn't make sense to have a copy of Noto Sans latin + symbols in every font. Perhaps we should have a build pipeline which adds Latin Core to each font and exports that as a separate target.

[simoncozens]

We now do this: the build pipeline automatically adds Latin Core to the "full" and "googlefonts" outputs of its releases. See e.g. https://notofonts.github.io/dives-akuru/