Typography - language support

Question 1

Why should you care about the length of words in different languages?

Answer 1

Word length can vary greatly across languages, even those that use similar glyphs, such as English and German.

Source material.io

Question 2

What is the problem with alignment on different languages

Answer 2

Some writing systems, like Arabic and Hebrew, are displayed with characters appearing from right to left. Those fonts may appear smaller than Latin ones at the same font-size, requiring adjustments to line spacing and alignment so that the typography works well in that UI for all languages.

Source material.io

Question 3

Why is vertical space important for a font?

Answer 3

Many writing systems require more vertical space than English, so your UI should provide sufficient vertical space for these different systems.

Source material.io

Question 4

List all three writing systems categories

Answer 4

• English-like - The languages of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe and much of Africa are typically written in the Latin alphabet. Vietnamese is a notable exception in that, while it uses a localized form of the Latin writing system, its accented glyphs can be much taller than those found in Western European languages. The Greek and Cyrillic writing systems are very similar to Latin.
• Tall - Language scripts that require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs, including South and Southeast Asian and Middle-Eastern languages, like Arabic, Hindi, Telugu, Thai, and Vietnamese.
• Dense - Language scripts that require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Source Material.io

Question 5

What is noto?

Answer 5

Noto is a collection of high-quality fonts with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles. The Noto fonts are perfect for harmonious, aesthetic, and typographically correct global communication, in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems.

“Noto” means “I write, I mark, I note” in Latin. The name is also short for “no tofu”, as the project aims to eliminate ‘tofu’: blank rectangles shown when no font is available for your text.

Source fonts.google.com/noto