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Comment by cag_ii | Hacker News Reader

Related blog post here:

https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-fon...

> "Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters."

Wow. That's a lot of work.

Indeed but worth it if you are Google though.

How is this worth it for Google? Honest question, always wondered what Google gets out Google Fonts.

> How is this worth it for Google?

Text is more easily consumed by Google services (Search, Now, etc.) than, e.g., graphical representations, and information is more likely to be stored in text if there are fonts that support presenting the information people want to communicate. Having a font family covering all world languages (and covering the full gamut of Unicode characters) increases the scope of information that can be effectively communicated via text.

Google has a deceptively simple incentive to make everything better: better fonts, better browsers, better phones, etc, all this drives increased web adoption, hence increased advertising revenues.

PS: I love Noto specifically for its Unicode support. I use it on my blog. It's also the default "serif" font on Chrome for Android (but not Chrome for Linux).

"everything", except where it doesn't.

Its Usenet archives suffered from bitrot. Its RSS reader is no more.

I regret to inform you that Noto is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which is FSF-approved, and essentially ensures that it will be available to all in perpetuity.

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...

You aren't really contradicting that they have incentive to improve everything. Incentive is not the same as action. You're effectively arguing with clouds for being in the sky.

Then that makes "incentive" a rather useless word, because everyone who wants to make the world a better place also has the incentive to make everything better. Why single out Google if it's also true of Microsoft, Apple, and me?

Aside from the obvious benefit to having a Web that's less broken for everybody, one of my previous projects at Google was implementing support for multiple scripts in a mapping product. I literally don't know how I could have pulled this off without Noto: all other alternatives would have involved some combination of subpar quality, incomplete coverage, incompatible appearance or near-impossible license requirements.

(Standard disclaimer: I work at Google, but these views are my own, not Google's.)

Well, they can track people across sites that use Google Fonts, so maybe having a larger set of characters and encouraging more use gives them a farther tracking reach.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs:

What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.

Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers.

Google also said that their new messaging app would be end-to-end encrypted by default, and then quickly changed their mind when business reasons prevailed. Business reasons will always prevail. But even beyond that:

>For the lazy, a snippet indicating that no such tracking occurs: Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

That's not what the snippet says. It is a technical statement, not a privacy statement. It doesn't mean they can't track you, it means it's a tiny bit harder to track you. Nothing in there says "we don't cross-reference these data" or "these data aren't used for tracking purposes" or anything else. Just that your Google account information isn't sent to the font servers.

More relevantly, the Google Fonts privacy policy links to the general Google privacy policy, which doesn't have any special "if you're using Google Fonts we collect a whole lot less than this" subsection. They might be using the data. They might not be. They might not be using the data today but decide to start using it tomorrow.

If that was their goal, why would it be open source and licensed for self-hosting?

A completely valid point, even if you get downvoted for perceived cynicism.

But nothing requires you to link directly to the font on their CDN. The sources, the whole build pipeline, everything is available and you can host it all by yourself.

The font they created has nothing to do with tracking you, it just so happens that if hosted on Google Fonts they can also do that. But that's a feature of Google Fonts, not Noto.

Pure speculation, but I would guess the vast majority of people do NOT self-host. I use their CDN as it's faster and much easier to set up, just link in your CSS or whatever.

The SIL Open Font License restricts subsetting, so you do need to be careful when doing this (the license requires that you change the font name if you reduce the font's display quality). Google has gotten waivers to allow them to alter the fonts without changing their names.

The repository with the fonts and tools is here: https://github.com/google/fonts

Only fonts with “reserved name” clause have such restriction, and then you are only required to rename the modified font.

For it to be a valid point, it has to be a sensible strategy or position for Google to take. Do you actually think that under the list of goals and objectives for this project there was a bullet point that was like "* Better user tracking across the web". There are loads of reasons why it makes sense for Google to do this project ahead of user tracking. It's possible - anything is possible really - but does it make sense?

Even if this was remotely close to their goal, it still doesn't make sense. They already have Google Analytics on basically every website in existence. Investing millions of dollars in an extremely robust font to increase web tracking by 0.0000000001% seems like a terrible investment.

You're saying that Google, THE tracking company, is possibly sitting on this huge pipeline of data from IPs connecting to their CDN downloading fonts and they're just not doing anything with it? I would have a very hard time believing this.

Exactly! This is in my opinion only reason they do it.

Let me elaborate. I offer two situations and you can choose which one of them is more plausible.

a) What should we do next? Our cash is burning! Well, lets use countless human hours to make a beautiful font to make the world a better place!

b) How can we reach to more traffic that might be currently not visible to us? Well, maybe we should design a really beautiful font that everyone likes and host it in our server? Sounds like a plan, lets do it!

How about

c) We're making products supporting an unprecedented amount of locales and there's no font family out that that covers them all and still looks consistent, we're going to have to make it ourselves. Hey, if we open it up then there will be even more international content out there to put AdSense on!

Yes, this one looks also possible. Thank you for this.

Google has too much, not too little cash.

He may mean the cash is burning in that there are employees that need things to do at Google.

Although it's not always perfect, Google takes internationalization seriously. Its websites are used all over the world. Having a nice font that supports every language simplifies things.

They don't.

I18n on Android is seriously awful. For example, Android 5 shipped with an improperly escaped string in the French Canadian localization strings that would cause the phone to reboot in a loop if it was connected to a charger when opening the lockscreen. Even the latest Android version (Nougat) displays the battery as "24 % %" in the French localization, "Press power button twice for camera" has been translated to the near unreadable "App. 2x sur interr. pr activ. app. photo" (roughly "Prs pwr btn 2x fr cam.") and some of the localized strings are comically nonsensical.

"Takes seriously" is orthogonal to "is great at". There are also non-i18n problems in Android which lead to reboots.

If you expect the UI to be perfect in every language all the time, consider what you're actually asking.

Most of the fonts on Google Fonts are not, in fact, authored by Google. They're just distributing them, which is relatively cheap.

The Noto family is an exception.

> How is this worth it for Google?

Anytime you find yourself asking "why is big company X giving away Y for free?" the answer is usually that they're commoditizing their complements:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Virtually everything Google gives away for free follows this pattern.

Traffic insights for websites that don't use Google Analytics.

Except the fonts are cacheable for a year, so you won't be pinging Google on every site that uses Google Fonts. It wouldn't be a very good tracking mechanism, if that's what it were intended for.

Per their Fonts API ToS they don't track anything except total aggregate usage per font.

That only works if you use Google's hosted fonts though, right?

Yeah, but that's still plenty of webpages.

Well people keep saying they're interested in a better web. What they get out of it is data. If you include Google fonts they can track your users.

Tracking

110,000 characters is not every symbol in the Unicode standard, though. According to wikipedia Unicode 9.0 contains around 128,000.

Yep, Old Hungarian is still not there, nor anywhere else except for fonts that were specifically designed just for Old Hungarian.

I was happy when the script got included in Unicode 8.0 but if fonts don't support it, it's not much use.

It's bloody close though, and no doubt at least a useful chunk of that will eventually be filled out.

> When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge.

That right there is probably the most important ingredient of many moonshot projects.

Monotype has published a case study too: http://www.monotype.com/resources/case-studies/more-than-800...

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