Meet the first-ever open-source font to support Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters.
Adobe and Google have today released a new open source typeface that supports Japanese kanji, Chinese hanzi and Korean hanja characters, as well as Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.
This means designers no longer have to license multiple fonts to create content for international audiences across languages spoken by an estimated 1.5 billion people.
All in one
Created in collaboration with Asian font foundries Changzhou SinoType, Iwata Corporation, and Sandoll Communication, it's the first open source typeface to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean in one font family.
From left to right: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
The font also covers regional variations such as Traditional Chinese (including Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR) and Simplified Chinese. In all, the project partners have designed 65,535 glyphs for each font, the maximum number for the OpenType format.
Two names
The font family is being released under two different names by Adobe and Google. Adobe is releasing it through via its Typekit service, as well as SourceForge and GitHub, as Source Han Sans. Meanwhile Google is releasing the font under the name Noto Sans CJK as part of its Noto pan-Unicode font family.
The family is available in seven weights in full fonts, as well as region-specific subsets, equaling a total of 42 typefaces, designed for screen devices and print.
Drawing which shows modifications made to some of the characters to improve quality
Ideograph U+9AA8 ("bone"). From left to right: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese/Korean (shared)
Multi-language sample
An early draft of a Kanji character
Original sketch by type designer Ryoko Nishizuka
Will you be using the new font? Let us know in the comments!
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
