Adobe and Google released a family of open fonts for Asian languages.

Adobe has joined forces with Google to launch the Asian OpenType font set, which covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean, The Next Web writes . Adobe's font, named Source Han Sans , is the new open font for the Pan-CJK headset.

Google simultaneously released its own version of this font called Noto Sans CJK as part of a plan to create its Noto Pan-Unicode font family. Both font sets, developed in collaboration, are identical, except for the name. In fact, they will serve 1.5 billion people - about a quarter of the world's population.

The new font family is available in seven different saturation options; it supports Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese — all in one font. It also includes Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic from the Adobe Source Sans family.
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“The design is relatively modern in style, but it has simple touches and it’s single-line, so it makes the text clear and readable on small devices such as tablets and smartphones,” says Nicole Minoza, Adobe Product Marketing Manager, “Because without a serif, it can be easily applied — well suited for a single line of text or a short phrase, or what you can see in the program menu, as well as for longer lines of text in an electronic book or in a printed edition. ”

Source Han Sans is available in the following styles: ExtraLight (light), Light (light), Normal, Regular (normal), Medium (bold), Bold and Heavy (fat). Heavy and ExtraLight were designed by hand, while the rest were created using software interpolation. Overall, Adobe has released 42 fonts, with seven font styles and regionally specific subsets for screen and print.

Noto Sans CJK is also presented in seven styles: Thin (superluminous), Light (light), DemiLight, Regular (normal), Medium (bold), Bold (bold) and Black (superfat). Each typeface in the family has a total of 65,535 characters (the maximum number of characters supported in the OpenType format), and the whole family contains under half a million characters.

The project was developed for four years and was the result of international cooperation of five companies: Adobe, Google and design offices from Japan, China and Korea. The creators of the project say that for the first time a font family of this scale was released under an open license and became available to designers, developers and ordinary users.