More fonts, more languages

When we originally conceived of Match The Memory more than 10 years ago, we had no idea that creators from all over the world would eventually make games in hundreds of languages using dozens of writing systems. As such, we picked fonts that we thought were fun at the time, not considering localization support in the slightest.

In the mean time, a lot has changed on the web in general, and specifically on the site, and it’s time that the typefaces available to game creators on Match The Memory reflect those changes as well.

A Rocky Start

Not a very happy birthday in the “Action Jackson” or “African” fonts. 🙁

The original group of fonts included in Match The Memory had hit-or-miss support for character sets beyond the most basic ASCII characters. Some typefaces included support for supplemental and extended Latin characters (like ñ or å), but others would just give you an ugly box or not even show those characters when they were included.

🤮

If you wanted to go beyond that to more exotic writing systems like Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic, you had even fewer options. The Arial font included decent support for those Unicode blocks, but most creators didn’t know that, and left their text in whatever font they happened to pick first (see problems with that above) or resorted to taking screenshots of their text in some document on their computer, then uploading that to Match The Memory as an image. And if you wanted an Eastern language (like billions of people in the world read and write), you were mostly out of luck.

We speak your language

Now, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added several new fonts to our system. These typefaces, when taken together, allow cards to be created in dozens more languages and writing systems. We specifically checked the top languages spoken around the world and made sure to include support for their scripts.

LanguageFont Support
ChineseNoto Sans CJK Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)
EnglishMany
Hindi / Hindustani (Devanagari / Urdu)Noto Sans Devanagari / Noto Naskh Arabic
SpanishMany
ArabicArial / Noto Naskh Arabic
MalayNoto Naskh Arabic
RussianArial / Noto Sans / Noto Serif
BengaliNoto Sans Bengali
PortugueseMany
FrenchMany
LahndaNoto Naskh Arabic
JapaneseNoto Sans CJK Japanese
IndonesianNoto Sans / Noto Serif
Western PunjabiNoto Naskh Arabic / Noto Sans Gurmukhi
TurkishNoto Sans / Noto Serif
KoreanNoto Sans CJK Korean
HebrewArial / Noto Sans / Noto Serif
KhmerNoto Sans Khmer
ThaiNoto Sans Thai
TeluguNoto Sans Telugu
TamilNoto Sans Tamil

In the table above, you’ll see a lot of “Noto Sans”. These fonts come from Google’s Noto font project, which “aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.” We think it does a great job of providing support for all of the languages above, in a way that makes it easy for site creators like us to implement. Kudos to Google for compiling these fonts and making them available!

In addition to adding more language-based fonts, we also took this opportunity to incorporate some fun new font options to the system. From classics like Cooper Black and Times to more modern faces like Fira Sans and Inconsolata, you now have a few more choices when it comes to the visual language your games employ.

We also retired several fonts to help make room for those new ones. These deprecated fonts were ones that we originally thought would make interesting games, but that never really resonated with creators on the site. So we’re saying a fond goodbye to Bleeding Cowboys and Viner Hand (and good riddance to Papyrus). Existing games that used these fonts still show them without problem, but you can no longer select them when editing games.

We’ve got plans to translate the site and editor itself into many languages. We’re also working on a way to easily compare all of the fonts available in the game editor and what writing systems they support. (Update: the fonts page has now launched!)

In the mean time, we hope that you enjoy the new font options. Go create something that you couldn’t easily do before! Let us know if there are languages or fonts that you’d like to see added to the system.

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