Noto font-family by Google, an ambitious free font project aimed at creating a font-family that covers more than 800 languages, with the the goal to create a family of fonts that appear at least distantly related across all languages.
“We wanted to make it so when people changed their language settings it didn’t look like they were using a completely different platform,” Matteson says. He designed Noto to be modern but friendly, with open counters, soft terminals, and strokes rooted in 5th century calligraphy. He avoided making Noto too austere, mostly because the shapes wouldn’t translate as nicely to other languages. “It’s not easy to interpret fancy calligraphic languages like Tibetan into a Futura typeface model, which is all circles and straight lines,” he says.
The team has fully adopted this font-family as part of my last project. It is typically known that Arabic or tall based language scripts tend to be smaller overall, they require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs, including South and Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern languages, like Arabic, Hindi, Telugu, Thai, Vietnamese.
As seen here, Arial font-size 16 is considerably smaller than Noto Sans font-size 16 (same observation happens in Arial on both languages).
The general rule of thumb has been to increase the Arabic font-size by about 4 points.
Google’s new Noto font-family actually works around this size difference, at least between English and Arabic from what I’ve observed.
Here, Noto Kufi Arabic and Noto Sans English are both almost the same size, with the right line-height consideration, one would actually not need to change font-sizes or heights between English and Arabic at all.
