Google Fonts launches Japanese support

In September 2018, Google Fonts launched support for Japanese web fonts, following the introduction of Korean fonts earlier in the year, by optimizing their font slicing system to handle the large and complex character sets typical of these languages. This optimization reduced data transfer by over 30% for Korean users, and a similar approach for Japanese fonts involves analyzing character frequency from millions of webpages to efficiently slice and deliver only the necessary font parts. By adopting unicode-range, woff2, and HTTP/2 technologies, Google Fonts enables finer-grained slicing and concurrent delivery of small files, significantly reducing the byte load for users. For Korean, segmenting the top 2,000 characters into 20 slices resulted in a 38% reduction in data transfer, while segmenting the top 3,000 Japanese characters into 20 slices led to an 80% reduction. These advancements allow for faster user experiences and pave the way for future collaborations with the W3C to develop new web standards, while also indicating Google's ongoing commitment to further optimize and expand their font offerings.