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Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.

As well as making signage clearer, it's been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that a given task is easier to perform because information printed in a legible typeface ostensibly requires less mental effort to understand and process. Interestingly, some studies suggest when words are harder to process, people pay more attention to what the words actually say; because of that, the memory trace becomes stronger, aiding comprehension and retention. Printing something in hard-to-read font increases "desirable difficulty," the addition of an obstruction to the learning process that requires you to put in just enough effort, which leads to better memory retention and deeper cognitive processing." For those of you who might be interested in testing desirable difficulty out, the author suggests an experimental design.

"The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material," a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. "But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can't skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully."

I wonder how this might relate to second language learning. When one doesn't know the words, even if the font is markedly legible, reading is slower and more difficult. One would expect comprehension and retention to be better, but I doubt that is the case. Interesting article. Must be why wedding invitations get put into Olde English or ornate script typefaces -- so that folks will read the names more carefully.

Ha!