Noto Sans HK

There are 6 people named inside the files of Noto Sans HK, and the work was split by script. The ideographs, kana and bopomofo are Ryoko Nishizuka’s work. Paul D. Hunt drew Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and Sandoll Communications supplied the hangul, through Soo-young Jang and Joo-yeon Kang. Ken Lunde is credited as project architect, meaning he defined the glyph set and ran production on the whole thing, with Masataka Hattori next to him on production and ideograph elements. The copyright is Adobe’s, 2014 to 2021, with Source as the reserved name, while the Google catalog credits the family to Google. So whose font is it? Adobe drew it and Google publishes it in the Noto collection.

The HK in the name is why this version exists at all. Google describes it as the cut for languages in Hong Kong that are written with the Traditional Chinese form of the Han ideograms, and it went into their library in March 2019. Each style carries 20,755 characters. Japanese kana, hangul and a Latin set with the Vietnamese accents ride along, so a Chinese and English page, or a form with a Korean surname on it, can stay inside 1 family.

There are 9 weights, Thin through Black, and no italics.

Our view on those weights: a dense ideograph drawn in Thin or ExtraLight loses its inner spaces quickly once the size drops, so we would keep the 2 lightest for big headings and let Regular or Medium carry the running text. Black is another matter, a heavy Chinese poster weight that holds together at large sizes very well.