Learning Better Font Slicing Strategies from Data

Defensive Publication

[Link] to Technical Disclosure Commons

[PDF] of the document

Authors

Quan Wang (quanw@google.com), Yiran Mao (yiranm@google.com)

Abstract

Often, fonts used in online resources such as websites are downloaded from a server to a local device used for browsing the resource. While typical Latin fonts are relatively small, such as on the order of hundreds of kilobytes, some Latin fonts and, more typically, non-Latin, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., fonts can be much larger, such as on the order of tens of megabytes. Distributing these fonts in their entirety can result in a slow user experience, and so what is needed is a method for faster distribution of these web fonts.

Generally, the present disclosure is directed to serving font files in topical subsets. In particular, in some implementations, the systems and methods of the present disclosure can include or otherwise leverage one or more machine-learned models to predict topic labels of characters in a font based on a corpus of characters or glyphs.

Early Access

Noto Sans SC Sliced (Chinese Simplified) is now publicly accessible on Early Access!

This font is the sliced version of Noto Sans SC , using the topic model + genetic algorithm approach describe here. It serves all 44,683 characters of this font, while Noto Sans SC only serves a subset of 8105 characters .

.@Google is using #MachineLearning to optimize Chinese, Japanese & Korean web fonts - so they load faster than ever: https://t.co/HKYJMcc1iG pic.twitter.com/KKlysaSRix

— Google Fonts (@googlefonts) August 22, 2017

Top Users

  • translate.google.cn
  • developers.google.com
  • my.clevelandclinic.org
  • mini.gameloft.com.cn
  • www.kerrylogistics.com
  • www.kdanmobile.com
  • neum.kr
  • www.solvil-et-titus.my
  • www.mala-1.com.tw
  • www.solvil-et-titus.hk
  • www.honam.ac.kr
  • allie-campaign.com
  • www.toyota-body.co.jp
  • tw.news.kobo.com
  • www.mos.ru
  • Media

    Google Fonts official Twitter announcements

  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900019727732531200
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900143295405469698
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900374191576293376
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900536047674720256
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900744987041726464
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/900843782651891713
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/901108264007553024
  • https://twitter.com/googlefonts/status/901658119809458176
  • Unsolicited media/blog coverage (mostly in Chinese)

  • landiannews
  • dyartstyle
  • ziti163
  • baozouweilai
  • cnbeta
  • cnblogs
  • eastday
  • laod
  • kknews
  • Production

    🇨🇳 New year—new, faster fonts! Announcing support for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts. Learn more: https://t.co/B37jIlFDfp pic.twitter.com/vKSzUKf6Y4

    — Google Fonts (@googlefonts) February 5, 2019

    Japanese web fonts now load faster than ever! We just added 6 new kanji fonts using our ⚡️⚡️⚡️ fast delivery system → Check ‘em out in our catalog, https://t.co/6PAeAIrnXo pic.twitter.com/jlH58JSesC

    — Google Fonts (@googlefonts) August 27, 2018

    Did you know that Google Fonts now supports Korean, with 23 choices? Learn the technical details that made this possible on the Google Developers blog 👉  https://t.co/4Xg6nOyOK2 pic.twitter.com/mpC0QMUf1L

    — Google Fonts (@googlefonts) April 4, 2018
  • Google Fonts launches Simplified and Traditional Chinese support
  • Google Fonts launches Japanese support—and makes loading large fonts even faster
  • Google Fonts launches Korean support and unveils faster delivery system
  • Google Fonts launches Korean support