Noto Serif HK is an modulated (“serif”) design for languages in Hong Kong that use the Traditional Chinese variant of the Han ideograms. It also supports Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Katakana, Hiragana and Hangul.

Noto Serif HK has multiple weights, contains 65,535 glyphs, 23 OpenType features, and supports 44,746 characters from 55 Unicode blocks: CJK Unified Ideographs, Hangul Syllables, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, CJK Compatibility Ideographs, Hangul Jamo, CJK Compatibility, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms, Kangxi Radicals, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months, Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement, Box Drawing, CJK Radicals Supplement, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E, Katakana, Hangul Compatibility Jamo, Hiragana, Latin Extended Additional, Latin-1 Supplement, Basic Latin, Enclosed Alphanumerics, Mathematical Operators, Hangul Jamo Extended-B, Cyrillic, Enclosed Ideographic Supplement, CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement, CJK Symbols and Punctuation, Miscellaneous Symbols, Greek and Coptic, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, Bopomofo, Geometric Shapes, CJK Strokes, General Punctuation, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D, Block Elements, CJK Compatibility Forms, Latin Extended-A, Hangul Jamo Extended-A, Bopomofo Extended, Miscellaneous Technical, Small Form Variants, Arrows, Latin Extended-B, Letterlike Symbols, Katakana Phonetic Extensions, Kanbun, Ideographic Description Characters, Vertical Forms, Spacing Modifier Letters, Dingbats, Combining Diacritical Marks, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, Alphabetic Presentation Forms, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F.

Supported writing systems

Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja)

Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja, 汉字, 漢字) is an East Asian logo-syllabary, written vertically right-to-left and horizontally left-to-right (over 1.3 billion users). Used at least since the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE) to write the Chinese (Sinitic) languages like Mandarin and Cantonese, but also, today or in the past, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Okinawan, Zhuang, Miao and other languages. The Han script has regional variations: Traditional Chinese (since the 5th century CE, today used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau), Simplified Chinese (used since 1949–1956 in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia), Japanese (called Hanji, used together with the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries in Japan), Korean (called Hanja, widely used for the Korean language since 400 BCE until the mid-20th century). Fundamentally the same characters represent the same or highly related concepts across dialects and languages, which themselves are often mutually unintelligible or completely unrelated. Some 2,100–2,500 Han characters are required for basic literacy, some 5,200–6,300 for reading typical texts. Many more are needed for specialized or historical texts: the Unicode Standard encodes over 94,000 Han characters. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Hangul

Hangul (Hangeul, 한글, Chosŏn'gŭl, 조선글) is an East Asian script, written vertically right-to-left and horizontally left-to-right (79 million users). Used for the Korean language. Created in 1446 by King Sejong the Great (Sejong of Joseon) as a simpler, phonetic alternative to using Chinese hanja for Korean. Not universally accepted for centuries, suppressed by Japanese colonial authorities. Since 1945 the standard script for Korean. The 51 basic letters (jamo) are grouped into syllable blocks depending on their position in the spoken syllable. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Latin

Latin (Roman) is a European bicameral alphabet, written left-to-right. The most popular writing system in the world. Used for over 3,000 languages including Latin and Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian), Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Nordic languages), Finnish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Visayan languages, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Polish, Somali, Vietnamese, and many others. Derived from Western Greek, attested in Rome in the 7th century BCE. In the common era, numerous European languages adopted the Latin script along with Western Christian religion, the script disseminated further with European colonization of the Americas, Australia, parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. New letters, ligatures and diacritical marks were gradually added to represent the sounds of various languages. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Katakana

Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ) is an East Asian syllabary, written vertically right-to-left and horizontally left-to-right (126 million users). Used in Japan for Japanese, Ryukyuan, Ainu and Palauan, and formerly for Taiwanese Hokkien. Katakana is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese, for the writing of loan words, for emphasis, to represent onomatopoeia, for technical and scientific terms, for names of plants, animals and minerals, and often for names of Japanese companies. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Hiragana

Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな) is an East Asian syllabary, written vertically right-to-left and horizontally left-to-right (120 million users). Used in Japan for Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages. Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, as well as miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Emoji symbols

Emoji symbols are pictograms, logograms, ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Their primary function is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation. They are typically rendered as multi-color characters. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, r12a.

Bopomofo

Bopomofo (注音符號, 注音符号, ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) is an East Asian syllabary, written left-to-right. Developed in 1913 in China to be used for Mandarin Chinese transliteration alongside the Latin-based Wade–Giles system. Also called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols or Zhuyin (注音). Bopomofo is an official transliteration system in Taiwan, used in dictionaries, books, newspapers and journals to annotate the Taiwanese pronunciation of Chinese Han characters, and in electronic input methods. Largely replaced by Pinyin romanization in the People’s Republic of China. Also used as the primary script for Taiwan’s minority languages like Atayal, Taroko, Paiwan and Yami. Has 21 onset consonants, 16 rhymes, and 4 tone marks. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Cyrillic

Cyrillic is a bicameral alphabet originating in Europe, written left-to-right (250 million users). Used for various languages across Eurasia and is used as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, including Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Bashkort, Chechen, Chuvash, Avar, Dargwa, Kabardian, Karakalpak, Kumyk, Lezgi, Ossetic, Pontic, Yakut, Buriat and many others. Created in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessaloniki working in Bulgaria, after earlier creation of the Glagolitic script. Sometimes attributed to Clement of Ohrid, a student of Saint Cyril’s. Initially used for Old Church Slavonic. Reformed in 1708 by Russian tsar Peter the Great. Extended by the Soviet Union in the 20th century to write over 50 languages throughout Eastern Europe and Asia (some of those languages switched to Latin after 1991). Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.

Greek

Greek (Ελληνικά) is a European bicameral alphabet, written left-to-right (11 million users). Used to write the Greek language since the 8th century BCE. Also used to write other languages like Urum, Albanian Tosk, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish. Some symbols are also used in scientific notation. Derived from Phoenician. First “true alphabet”, with distinct letters for consonants and vowels. Standardized in the 4th century BCE by Eucleides. Has 24 letters. Some letter variants (sigma: σ/ς) have positional significance in the Greek language, other variants only differ in meaning in scientific notation (e.g. pi: π/ϖ). The Greek language used to be written in polytonic spelling, with three accents on vowels. In 1982, Greece introduced monotonic spelling with a single diacritic. Needs software support for complex text layout (shaping). Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.