Amazing new Google and Adobe font supports SEVEN alphabets, totals 65,535 glyphs

A new open source typeface that includes seven of the world’s most used alphabets has been developed, with its creators claiming a world-first for multi-language support. Known as Source Han Sans it supports Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, bringing together languages used by billions of people worldwide.

The development and design of the new super font bought together more than 100 people working for both Adobe and Google to design 65,535 glyphs for each font, the maximum amount supported by the OpenType format. The project, which took three years to complete, hopes to make it easier for designers and developers around the world to work together.

Japanese kanji, Chinese hanzi and Korean hanja typically use individually created fonts, with separate sets again for Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Source Han Sans claims to be the first open source font to support all of these languages, as well as regional variants.

Adobe said the font was the most complex it had ever developed, adding that it would finally allow developers building websites and applications in multiple languages to use a single font. Google added that the development of the new font was a “major step towards the coverage of all languages”.

Google is releasing the font under the name Noto Sans CJK as part of its Noto pan-Unicode font family. Source Han Sans is available now via Adobe Typekit and Typekit in Adobe Creative Cloud. As the project is open source it is also available for free on SourceForge an Github.