Tag Archives: Japanese

Google Fonts launches Japanese support

Posted by the Google Fonts team

The Google Fonts catalog now includes Japanese web fonts. Since shipping Korean in February, we have been working to optimize the font slicing system and extend it to support Japanese. The optimization efforts proved fruitful—Korean users now transfer on average over 30% fewer bytes than our previous best solution. This type of on-going optimization is a major goal of Google Fonts.

Japanese presents many of the same core challenges as Korean:

  1. Very large character set
  2. Visually complex letterforms
  3. A complex writing system: Japanese uses several distinct scripts (explained well by Wikipedia)
  4. More character interactions: Line layout features (e.g. kerning, positioning, substitution) break when they involve characters that are split across different slices

The impact of the large character set made up of complex glyph contours is multiplicative, resulting in very large font files. Meanwhile, the complex writing system and character interactions forced us to refine our analysis process.

To begin supporting Japanese, we gathered character frequency data from millions of Japanese webpages and analyzed them to inform how to slice the fonts. Users download only the slices they need for a page, typically avoiding the majority of the font. Over time, as they visit more pages and cache more slices, their experience becomes ever faster. This approach is compatible with many scripts because it is based on observations of real-world usage.

Frequency of the popular Japanese and Korean characters on the web

As shown above, Korean and Japanese have a relatively small set of characters that are used extremely frequently, and a very long tail of rarely used characters. On any given page most of the characters will be from the high frequency part, often with a few rarer characters mixed in.

We tried fancier segmentation strategies, but the most performant method for Korean turned out to be simple:

  1. Put the 2,000 most popular characters in a slice
  2. Put the next 1,000 most popular characters in another slice
  3. Sort the remaining characters by Unicode codepoint number and divide them into 100 equally sized slices

A user of Google Fonts viewing a webpage will download only the slices needed for the characters on the page. This yielded great results, as clients downloaded 88% fewer bytes than a naive strategy of sending the whole font. While brainstorming how to make things even faster, we had a bit of a eureka moment, realizing that:

  1. The core features we rely on to efficiently deliver sliced fonts are unicode-range and woff2
  2. Browsers that support unicode-range and woff2 also support HTTP/2
  3. HTTP/2 enables the concurrent delivery of many small files

In combination, these features mean we no longer have to worry about queuing delays as we would have under HTTP/1.1, and therefore we can do much more fine-grained slicing.

Our analyses of the Japanese and Korean web shows most pages tend to use mostly common characters, plus a few rarer ones. To optimize for this, we tested a variety of finer-grained strategies on the common characters for both languages.

We concluded that the following is the best strategy for Korean, with clients downloading 38% fewer bytes than our previous best strategy:

  1. Take the 2,000 most popular Korean characters, sort by frequency, and put them into 20 equally sized slices
  2. Sort the remaining characters by Unicode codepoint number, and divide them into 100 equally sized slices

For Japanese, we found that segmenting the first 3,000 characters into 20 slices was best, resulting in clients downloading 80% fewer bytes than they would if we just sent the whole font. Having sufficiently reduced transfer sizes, we now feel confident in offering Japanese web fonts for the first time!

Now that both Japanese and Korean are live on Google Fonts, we have even more ideas for further optimization—and we will continue to ship updates to make things faster for our users. We are also looking forward to future collaborations with the W3C to develop new web standards and go beyond what is possible with today's technologies (learn more here).

PS - Google Fonts is hiring :)

Noto Serif CJK is here!

Crossposted from the Google Developers Blog

Today, in collaboration with Adobe, we are responding to the call for Serif! We are pleased to announce Noto Serif CJK, the long-awaited companion to Noto Sans CJK released in 2014. Like Noto Sans CJK, Noto Serif CJK supports Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all in one font.

A serif-style CJK font goes by many names: Song (宋体) in Mainland China, Ming (明體) in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Minchō (明朝) in Japan, and Myeongjo (명조) or Batang (바탕) in Korea. The names and writing styles originated during the Song and Ming dynasties in China, when China's wood-block printing technique became popular. Characters were carved along the grain of the wood block. Horizontal strokes were easy to carve and vertical strokes were difficult; this resulted in thinner horizontal strokes and wider vertical ones. In addition, subtle triangular ornaments were added to the end of horizontal strokes to simulate Chinese Kai (楷体) calligraphy. This style continues today and has become a popular typeface style.

Serif fonts, which are considered more traditional with calligraphic aesthetics, are often used for long paragraphs of text such as body text of web pages or ebooks. Sans-serif fonts are often used for user interfaces of websites/apps and headings because of their simplicity and modern feeling.

Design of '永' ('eternity') in Noto Serif and Sans CJK. This ideograph is famous for having the most important elements of calligraphic strokes. It is often used to evaluate calligraphy or typeface design.

The Noto Serif CJK package offers the same features as Noto Sans CJK:

  • It has comprehensive character coverage for the four languages. This includes the full coverage of CJK Ideographs with variation support for four regions, Kangxi radicals, Japanese Kana, Korean Hangul and other CJK symbols and letters in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. It also provides a limited coverage of CJK Ideographs in Plane 2 of Unicode, as necessary to support standards from China and Japan.


Simplified Chinese
Supports GB 18030 and China’s latest standard Table of General Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表) published in 2013.
Traditional Chinese
Supports BIG5, and Traditional Chinese glyphs are compliant to glyph standard of Taiwan Ministry of Education (教育部國字標準字體).
Japanese
Supports all of the kanji in  JIS X 0208, JIS X 0213, and JIS X 0212 to include all kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6.
Korean
The best font for typesetting classic Korean documents in Hangul and Hanja such as Humninjeongeum manuscript, a UNESCO World Heritage.
Supports over 1.5 million archaic Hangul syllables and 11,172 modern syllables as well as all CJK ideographs in KS X 1001 and KS X 1002
Noto Serif CJK’s support of character and glyph set standards for the four languages
  • It respects diversity of regional writing conventions for the same character. The example below shows the four glyphs of '述' (describe) in four languages that have subtle differences.
From left to right are glyphs of '述' in S. Chinese, T. Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This character means "describe".
  • It is offered in seven weights: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, and Black. Noto Serif CJK supports 43,027 encoded characters and includes 65,535 glyphs (the maximum number of glyphs that can be included in a single font). The seven weights, when put together, have almost a half-million glyphs. The weights are compatible with Google's Material Design standard fonts, Roboto, Noto Sans and Noto Serif(Latin-Greek-Cyrillic fonts in the Noto family).
Seven weights of Noto Serif CJK
    • It supports vertical text layout and is compliant with the Unicode vertical text layout standard. The shape, orientation, and position of particular characters (e.g., brackets and kana letters) are changed when the writing direction of the text is vertical.



    The sheer size of this project also required regional expertise! Glyph design would not have been possible without leading East Asian type foundries Changzhou SinoType Technology, Iwata Corporation, and Sandoll Communications.

    Noto Serif CJK is open source under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. We invite individual users to install and use these fonts in their favorite authoring apps; developers to bundle these fonts with your apps, and OEMs to embed them into their devices. The fonts are free for everyone to use!

    Noto Serif CJK font download:https://www.google.com/get/noto
    Noto Serif CJK on GitHub:https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-cjk
    Adobe's landing page for this release: http://adobe.ly/SourceHanSerif
    Source Han Serif on GitHub: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif/tree/release/

    By Xiangye Xiao and Jungshik Shin, Internationalization Engineering team

    Noto Serif CJK is here!


    Posted by Xiangye Xiao and Jungshik Shin, Internationalization Engineering team

    Today, in collaboration with Adobe, we are responding to the call for Serif! We are pleased to announce Noto Serif CJK, the long-awaited companion to Noto Sans CJK released in 2014. Like Noto Sans CJK, Noto Serif CJK supports Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all in one font.

    A serif-style CJK font goes by many names: Song (宋体) in Mainland China, Ming (明體) in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Minchō (明朝) in Japan, and Myeongjo (명조) or Batang (바탕) in Korea. The names and writing styles originated during the Song and Ming dynasties in China, when China's wood-block printing technique became popular. Characters were carved along the grain of the wood block. Horizontal strokes were easy to carve and vertical strokes were difficult; this resulted in thinner horizontal strokes and wider vertical ones. In addition, subtle triangular ornaments were added to the end of horizontal strokes to simulate Chinese Kai (楷体) calligraphy. This style continues today and has become a popular typeface style.

    Serif fonts, which are considered more traditional with calligraphic aesthetics, are often used for long paragraphs of text such as body text of web pages or ebooks. Sans-serif fonts are often used for user interfaces of websites/apps and headings because of their simplicity and modern feeling.

    Design of '永' ('eternity') in Noto Serif and Sans CJK. This ideograph is famous for having the most important elements of calligraphic strokes. It is often used to evaluate calligraphy or typeface design.

    The Noto Serif CJK package offers the same features as Noto Sans CJK:

    • It has comprehensive character coverage for the four languages. This includes the full coverage of CJK Ideographs with variation support for four regions, Kangxi radicals, Japanese Kana, Korean Hangul and other CJK symbols and letters in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. It also provides a limited coverage of CJK Ideographs in Plane 2 of Unicode, as necessary to support standards from China and Japan.


    Simplified Chinese
    Supports GB 18030 and China’s latest standard Table of General Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表) published in 2013.
    Traditional Chinese
    Supports BIG5, and Traditional Chinese glyphs are compliant to glyph standard of Taiwan Ministry of Education (教育部國字標準字體).
    Japanese
    Supports all of the kanji in  JIS X 0208, JIS X 0213, and JIS X 0212 to include all kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6.
    Korean
    The best font for typesetting classic Korean documents in Hangul and Hanja such as Humninjeongeum manuscript, a UNESCO World Heritage.
    Supports over 1.5 million archaic Hangul syllables and 11,172 modern syllables as well as all CJK ideographs in KS X 1001 and KS X 1002
    Noto Serif CJK’s support of character and glyph set standards for the four languages
    • It respects diversity of regional writing conventions for the same character. The example below shows the four glyphs of '述' (describe) in four languages that have subtle differences.
    From left to right are glyphs of '述' in S. Chinese, T. Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This character means "describe".
    • It is offered in seven weights: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, and Black. Noto Serif CJK supports 43,027 encoded characters and includes 65,535 glyphs (the maximum number of glyphs that can be included in a single font). The seven weights, when put together, have almost a half-million glyphs. The weights are compatible with Google's Material Design standard fonts, Roboto, Noto Sans and Noto Serif(Latin-Greek-Cyrillic fonts in the Noto family).
    Seven weights of Noto Serif CJK
      • It supports vertical text layout and is compliant with the Unicode vertical text layout standard. The shape, orientation, and position of particular characters (e.g., brackets and hiragkana letters) are changed when the writing direction of the text is vertical.



      The sheer size of this project also required regional expertise! Glyph design would not have been possible without leading East Asian type foundries Changzhou SinoType Technology, Iwata Corporation, and Sandoll Communications.

      Noto Serif CJK is open source under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. We invite individual users to install and use these fonts in their favorite authoring apps; developers to bundle these fonts with your apps, and OEMs to embed them into their devices. The fonts are free for everyone to use!

      Noto Serif CJK font download:https://www.google.com/get/noto
      Noto Serif CJK on GitHub:https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-cjk
      Adobe's landing page for this release: http://adobe.ly/SourceHanSerif
      Source Han Serif on GitHub: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif/tree/release/

      The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads is now available in Spanish and Japanese

      Thanks for your feedback on our recently launched The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads. We’re thrilled to announce that it’s now available in Spanish and Japanese.

      For our Spanish and Japanese-speaking developer communities, we hope that this ebook will help you implement native ads, an ad format that effectively monetizes while preserving the user experience. Native ads match the look and feel of the content within your app and as spending on native ads is expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018, this presents a huge opportunity for publishers to enhance their user experience and tap into new revenues.

      In this guide, you’ll learn:

      • Guiding design principles that will help you better implement native ads 
      • Practical tips, best practices and examples for implementing native ads 
      • How to set up a proper A/B test to begin testing native ads 
      • Ways that AdMob can help you implement native ads. 

      Download your free copy of The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads in Spanish and Japanese today and learn practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads in your app.

      Remember to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.

      Source: Inside AdMob


      The AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement is Now Available in More Languages!

      Thank you for your feedback on our recently launched The AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement and letting us know how it has helped you grow your online business. Now you can download the guide in 2 additional languages: Portuguese and Spanish.

      Download the guide today, and like thousands of other AdSense publishers, learn how to engage with your users like never before. The guide contains useful advice and best practices that will help you drive engagement on your site, including:
      1. Tips to help your audience become familiar with your brand 
      2. Best practices to design delightful user journeys 
      3. Ideas on how to develop content that resonates with your audience 
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      5. Reasons why you should share the love with other sites by referring to good sources.
      Ready? Download your free copy of the #AdSenseGuide now in any of the following languages:


      Enjoy the guide and we’d love to hear your feedback on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide.

      Posted by: Jay Castro from the AdSense team

      Source: Inside AdSense