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Nowar Sans for World of Warcraft

This is Nowar Sans, font packs for World of Warcraft and WoW Classic that support all client languages. Nowar Sans is based on Noto Sans and Source Han Sans.

Make Love, Not Warcraft.
要有爱，不要魔兽争霸。
要愛，不要魔獸。

Download the Fonts

Latest release at GitHub

Mirrors: Gitee (Release Repo)

Nowar Sans is shipped in 7 weights and 5 regional variants, with several features. More weights (any number from 200 to 900!) can be built form source.

Weights

• 300: Light
• 350: SemiLight
• 400: Regular
• 450: Book
• 500: Medium
• 600: SemiBold
• 700: Bold

Regional Variants

Bliz and Neut are “standard variants” with regional Chinese character orthographies.

	European and 한국어	简体中文	繁體中文	Note
Bliz	Mainland China (UI)	Mainland China	Taiwan	Acts like WoW’s default fallback setting.
Neut	Classical (UI)	Mainland China	Taiwan	Prefers classical orthography on fallback.

CL is the “classical variant” with classical Chinese character orthography (aka Kāngxī Dictionary forms).

	European and 한국어	中文
CL	Classical (UI)	Classical

PSimp and PSimpChat are special variants for 繁體中文 that remap traditional Chinese character to simplified ones.

	Common Fonts	繁體中文 Text, Combat and Tooltip Fonts	繁體中文 Chat Fonts	European, 简体中文 and 한국어
PSimp	Mainland China (UI, Remapped)	Mainland China (Remapped)	Mainland China	N/A
PSimpChat	Mainland China (UI, Remapped)	Mainland China (Remapped)	Mainland China (Remapped)	N/A

• European: English, Español (AL), Português, Deutsch, Español (EU), Français, Italiano, and Русский.
• UI: Ambiguous punctations are treated as Western; CJK puctations are half-width.
• Common fonts: FRIZQT__ and ARIALN, which are hard-coded in some addons.

Features

Tag	Name	Description
OSF	Oldstyle	Oldstyle (non-lining), proportional figure.
RP	Roleplaying	丶 (U+4E36) is mapped to the same glyph as · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT).
SC	Smallcaps	Small capitals for Latin.

Pre-built feature variants: Bliz,RP, Neut,OSF, Neut,SC.

PTR Cross Language Distributions (XLang)

CyR (Cyrillic Romanisation), Pinyin and Romaja are “cross-language variants” for PTR realms that transliterate or transcript Cyrillic, Chinese and Hanguel characters to Latin letters.

Variant	Description	Example
CyR	Replace Cyrillic letters with underlined smapp-capital Latin letters, using the ISO 9:1995 (or GOST 2002) system	R̲ᴜ̲s̲s̲ᴋ̲ɪ̲ᴊ̲ (Русский)
Pinyin	Append small-capital Hànyǔ Pīnyīn to Chinese characters	汉ʜᴀ̀ɴ字ᴢɪ̀
Romaja	Append small-capital Romaja to Hanguel characters	한ʜᴀɴ글ɢᴜᴇʟ

Due to the technical limitation, the CyR is implemented as feature variant and is applied to all languages (we can not distinguish cyrillic chat font from latin chat font – they are both ARAILN) while Pinyin and Romaja are implemented as regional variant and are applied to non-Chinese or non-Korean languages (applying to native language will heavily break UI layout).

Variant	Implementation	Applied to
CyR	Feature variant	All languages
Pinyin	Regional variant (based on Neut)	All except 简体中文 and 繁體中文
Romaja	Regional variant (based on Neut)	All except 한국어

As a result, the XLang variants can be confusing and thus are distributed under a dedicated tag with an -xlang suffix.

Distribution	CyR	Pinyin	Romaja
Pinyin,Romaja,CyR	✓	✓	✓
Pinyin,CyR	✓	✓	✗
Romaja,CyR	✓	✗	✓
Neut,CyR	✓	✗	✗
Pinyin,Romaja	✗	✓	✓
Pinyin	✗	✓	✗
Romaja	✗	✗	✓

How to Build

Dependencies

• basic Unix utils (zstd included),
• Python,
• fontTools,
• Node.js,
• otfcc and
• 7-Zip (add to PATH).

Note:

• Choose 64-bit version. 32-bit version will lead to out-of-memory issue.

Build Feature Variant

Prepare submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Prepare Node.js dependency:

npm install

Run configure.py to generate Makefile:

python configure.py

Put Source Han Sans variable OTF files to source/shs/.

Then make a specific variant:

make <region>,<features>-<weight> -j<threads>

Note: Features must be sorted alphabetically. (OSF, RP, SC).

e.g.

make CN,OSF,RP-400 -j4

The output is out/NowarSans-<region>,<features>-<weight>-<version>.7z.

Customise Weight

Any number from 200 to 900 (both included) is valid weight value for Nowar Sans. Numbers from 100 (included) to 200 (excluded) are also available, but CJK part will be same weight as 200.

To build a font pack with customised weight value, modify configure.py:

class Config:
    # put your weight here
    fontPackWeight = [ <your_weight> ]

Then, run python configure.py to generate Makefile. The new weight (with optional feature) can be built by:

make <region>,<features>-<weight> -j<threads>

Create Regional Variant

To build exactly what you need, modify configure.py:

class Config:
    # put your variant here
    fontPackRegion = [ <your_region> ]

# define the variant here.
regionalVariant = { ... }

For example, the “CNmulti” multi-orthography variant,

	European	简体中文	繁體中文	한국어
CNmulti	Mainland China (UI)	Mainland China	Taiwan	S. Korea (UI)

class Config:
    fontPackRegion = [ "CNmulti" ]

regionalVariant = {
    "CNmulti": {
        "base": "CN",
        "enUS": True,
        "ruRU": True,
        "zhCN": "CN",
        "zhTW": "TW",
        "koKR": "KR",
    }
}

Then, run python configure.py to generate Makefile. The new regional variant (with optional feature) can be built by:

make <region>,<features>-<weight> -j<threads>

e.g.

make CNmulti-400 -j4
make CNmulti,OSF-400 -j4

Credit

Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters are built from Noto Source, the source “code” for Noto Sans by Google.

CJK Ideographs, Kana and Hangul are from Source Han Sans by Adobe.

The traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese conversion table is from Open Chinese Convert project.

Build Noto Sans Variable-OTF from Source

First of all, prepare the repo.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-source.git
cd noto-source
./build setup

Then activate the build environment.

source env/bin/activate

To build the font, call the fontmake command.

fontmake -g src/NotoSans-MM.glyphs -o variable-cff2

The output is in variable_otf/.