When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as substitute characters (typically small rectangles ). They represent the characters that cannot be displayed because no font with the necessary characters is installed on the computer, and have sometimes been called by the slang name tofu because of their visual similarity to the food of the same name.
Google's aim for Noto (whose name is derived from no tofu) is to remove this kind of 'tofu' from the Web.56
Noto is also derived from the Latin word noto, meaning "I write, I mark, I note", signifying Noto's goal of the ability to write in every language.7
The Noto Emoji Project provides color and black-and-white emoji fonts. The color version is used on the Gmail, Google Chat, Google Meet,8 Google Voice, and YouTube web apps, as well as the Android, Wear OS,9 and ChromeOS10 operating systems. It is also used on the Slack apps on Windows, Linux, and Android.11
Noto Sans and Noto Serif contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs. Noto Sans is based on Droid Sans and Open Sans, while Noto Serif is based on Droid Serif.12 They are designed by Steve Matteson.13
As recorded by the Unicode Consortium as being the preferred form for typesetting use,14 Noto Sans displays U+010F ď LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CARON as "d+apostrophe" rather than "d with a caron diacritic".
Main articles: Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif
Noto CJK fonts are also known as Adobe Source Han fonts, developed together by Adobe and Google which contains Chinese characters, hangul and kana;15 Latin-script letters and numerals are taken from the Source Pro fonts.16
In addition to the standard distributions, Ken Lunde of Adobe maintains a "Super" OpenType Collection (OTC) version that provides the families under two names at once. Since OTCs reuse existing glyphs, such a file containing both Noto and Source fonts is only 200KB larger than one containing only Source fonts.17
As of 29 December 2020 there are 195 Noto fonts, of which 156 are sans-serif style, 29 are serif style, and the remaining 10 fonts are not classified as serif or sans-serif.18 Noto Color Emoji provides multi-color emoji symbols up to Unicode 16 in the OpenType CBDT format. It works in Android, Google Chrome, Linux, Microsoft Windows 10 from 1607 including Cygwin, and in apps that support the OpenType CBDT format.19
The Noto fonts cover 162 out of the 168 scripts defined in Unicode version 16.0 (released in September 2024), as well as various syllables and emoji which do not belong to a specific script.
As of October 2016, all scripts encoded up to Unicode version 6.0 (released October 2010) were covered by Noto fonts, although not all characters defined in Unicode version 6.0 were covered. In particular, only about 30,000 of the 74,616 CJK unified ideographs defined in Unicode version 6.0 were covered by Noto fonts. None of the 53 scripts and 1 block encoded between Unicode versions 6.1 and 11.0 were covered by Noto fonts, although some symbols, emoji, and characters added to existing scripts after version 6.0 were covered. It is a design goal for 'Phase 3' to cover all characters in Unicode version 9.0 except for most of CJK unified ideographs outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.20
The Noto Sans Symbols fonts include a large variety of symbols, including alchemical signs, dingbats, numbers and letters enclosed in circles for lists, playing cards, domino and Mahjong tiles, chess piece icons, Greek, Byzantine and regular musical symbols and arrow symbols. Among mathematical symbols, it includes blackboard bold glyphs, a mathematical sans-serif font modeled on Helvetica, Fraktur and script fonts, hexagrams, and Aegean numerals.
As of February 2025, the Noto fonts in the GitHub repository have this coverage of Unicode 16:21
As of February 2025, the following fonts exist:
with distinctglyph
Italic Variable (Thin-Black; Extra-condensed-Black)
3093 (Variable Italic)
4676 (Variable Italic)
3327(Variable Italic)
2964 (Variable Italic)
3828 (Variable Italic)
3268 (Variable Italic)
10736 (Bold)
Variable Italic (Thin-Black; Extra-codennsed-regular)
Some projects provide a package for installing Noto fonts, e.g. Debian,22 Arch Linux,23 Fedora Linux,24 Gentoo Linux,25 CTAN.26 Since version 6.0, LibreOffice bundles Noto.27
Since 2019, Noto IKEA, a customised version of Noto Sans, is a corporate typeface of IKEA. It is used in pair with standard versions of Noto Sans and replaced Verdana as the corporate typeface.28
"Noto Dashboard". notofonts.github.io. Retrieved 2024-11-13. https://notofonts.github.io/ ↩
"Use Noto fonts". Retrieved 2023-09-22. https://fonts.google.com/noto/use ↩
"Noto Font". GitHub. Retrieved November 24, 2015. https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/blob/master/LICENSE ↩
"Add NEWS for license change - googlei18n/noto-fonts". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-04-03. https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/commit/787e6b68b264428063342415d7c96afa3a32eec9 ↩
Mizra, Tanvi (3 August 2014). "Can Google Build A Typeface To Support Every Written Language?". NPR. Retrieved 5 August 2014. https://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/08/03/337168933/-no-tofu-doesn-t-equate-to-no-problem-for-google-universal-typeface ↩
"Google Noto Fonts". google.com. Retrieved 18 January 2021. https://www.google.com/get/noto/ ↩
"Noto Home". Google Fonts. Retrieved 2025-03-29. https://fonts.google.com/noto ↩
Li, Abner (2021-02-17). "Google Meet adding emoji reactions, moderation tools". 9to5Google. Retrieved 2021-05-07. https://9to5google.com/2021/02/17/google-meet-emoji-reactions/ ↩
Campbell, Ian Carlos (2021-05-06). "Google remembers Wear OS long enough to add a new keyboard". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-05-07. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22423707/google-wear-os-gboard-swipe-type ↩
Schoon, Ben (2018-06-06). "How to get Chrome's built-in emoji picker on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac". 9to5Google. Retrieved 2021-05-07. https://9to5google.com/2018/06/06/how-to-get-google-chrome-emoji-picker-menu-chrome-os-windows-mac/ ↩
"Slack Overhauls Emoji Support With One Catch". Emojipedia. 2018-02-06. Retrieved 2021-05-07. https://blog.emojipedia.org/slack-overhauls-emoji-support/ ↩
"Noto use page". Google Fonts. Retrieved 29 October 2021. https://fonts.google.com/noto/use#faq ↩
"FAQ – Google Noto Fonts". https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/faq/ ↩
"Latin Extended-A". Unicode Consortium. https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/n_0100.html ↩
Nathan Willis (1 October 2014). "Google and Adobe's pan-CJK open font". LWN.net. Retrieved 23 February 2017. https://lwn.net/Articles/613284/ ↩
"Guidelines for Using Noto". Google Noto Fonts. Retrieved 7 October 2016. Currently, the Latin characters in the CJK fonts are from Adobe's Source Sans Pro https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/guidelines/ ↩
Lunde, Ken. "Super, Mega & Ultra OTCs". blogs.adobe.com. https://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2017/08/super-mega-ultra-otcs.html ↩
googlefonts/noto-fonts, Google Fonts, 2020-12-29, retrieved 2020-12-30 https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts ↩
"Noto Color Emoji". Archived from the original on 2024-04-20. Retrieved 2024-09-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20240420172840/https://notofonts.github.io/noto-docs/specimen/NotoColorEmoji/ ↩
"Frequently Asked Questions: What are Google's plans for Noto (so called "Phase 3")?". GitHub. Retrieved 8 October 2010. https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/blob/master/FAQ.md ↩
"Current Noto Sans Scripts Coverage (Excepted CJK and Emoji) · Issue #2071 · googlefonts/Noto-fonts". GitHub. https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/issues/2071#issuecomment-823370205 ↩
"Debian -- Details of package fonts-noto in sid". packages.debian.org. https://packages.debian.org/sid/fonts/fonts-noto ↩
"Arch Linux - noto-fonts 20190926-2 (any)". www.archlinux.org. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/noto-fonts/ ↩
"rpms / google-noto-fonts". Fedora Project. Retrieved September 20, 2022. https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/google-noto-fonts ↩
"Gentoo Packages - media-fonts/noto". packages.gentoo.org. https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/media-fonts/noto ↩
"CTAN: Package noto". www.ctan.org. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/noto ↩
"LibreOffice 6.0: Release Notes - The Document Foundation Wiki". wiki.documentfoundation.org. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0#Fonts ↩
Brewer, Jenny (21 August 2019). "Ikea swaps its brand typeface to Google and Monotype's Noto". It's Nice That. Retrieved 18 December 2019. Ikea has swapped its brand typeface to Noto, a collaborative type family from Monotype and Google, after a decade of using Verdana across its visual identity. Before 2009, the company used Ikea Sans – an adaptation of Futura – for 50 years, but moved to Verdana because its own-brand font didn't include Asian characters. https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/ikea-changes-typeface-to-noto-monotype-google-graphic-design-210819 ↩