The Noto family is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts.

Google's aim for Noto (whose name is derived from no tofu) is to remove this kind of 'tofu' from the Web.

[16] In addition to the standard distributions, Ken Lunde of Adobe maintains a "Super" OpenType Collection (OTC) version that provides the families under two names at once.

It works in Android, Google Chrome, Linux, Microsoft Windows 10 from 1607 including Cygwin, and in apps that support the OpenType CBDT format.

In particular, only about 30,000 of the 74,616 CJK unified ideographs defined in Unicode version 6.0 were covered by Noto fonts.

It is a design goal for 'Phase 3' to cover all characters in Unicode version 9.0 except for most of CJK unified ideographs outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.

It is used in pair with standard versions of Noto Sans and they replaced Verdana as a corporate typeface.