Noto CJK is available in multiple formats which have different uses. Each of these font formats used below has the capability to display both horizontal and vertical forms where appropriate. Any of the fonts that support Japanese will also be able to support proportional kana.
Note: ‘Monospace’ versions provide half-width instead of proportional widths for ASCII (U+0020 to U+007E) and the following characters: U+00A0, U+00A5, U+2011, and U+20A9. These come in two weights (Regular and Bold) for each of the five languages. These fonts have ‘Mono’ in the family name, e.g. ‘Noto Sans Mono CJK {hk, jp, kr, sc, tc}’.
The Variable OTC file contains all five language specific variable font resources in either OTF CFF2 or TTF formats. Monospace versions are also available covering the range from Regular to Bold. This format requires a system that supports both OTC OpenType Collections and variable fonts.
This packaging form carries the fonts for each of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Traditional Chinese HK, Japanese, and Korean multiplied by all 7 weights for each in one single font file. In addition, each language provides monospace versions in Regular and Bold weights. Once installed it will appear in font menus as 45 separate fonts. This format is the easiest to install of all the formats and takes the least space for static fonts due to sharing between the 45 pieces.
Special Note: This deployment format requires macOS (OS X) Version 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) or later, iOS 7 or later, Windows 10 Version 1703 (aka Creators Update) or later, a flavor of Linux that uses fontconfig and FreeType Version 2.5.0.1 or greater, or Adobe CS6 apps or later.
This packaging form carries the fonts for each of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Traditional Chinese HK, Japanese, and Korean in a single font file. Once installed it will appear in font menus as four or eight separate fonts. This format is the easiest to install and compared to installing separate fonts takes less space. There are 7 of these OTC font files with one for each weight from Thin to Black.
Two of these files (Regular and Bold) also contain ‘Monospace’ versions for each language. These files appear in font menus as separate fonts.
Special Note: This deployment format requires macOS (OS X) Version 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) or later, iOS 7 or later, Windows 10 Version 1607 (aka Anniversary Update) or later, a flavor of Linux that uses fontconfig and FreeType Version 2.5.0.1 or greater, or Adobe CS6 apps or later.
This packaging form has 5 language specific variants that have all the same glyph coverage as the OTC format but provide language coverage through the use of the OpenType ‘locl’ feature. In each of these font files there is a single default language which is used when the ‘locl’ feature isn't specified. There are 35 of these files (5 language default variants * 7 weights).
Each language also provides Monospace variants in Regular and Bold. There are 10 of these files (5 language default variants * 2 weights).
This packaging form has the same fonts as the Static Multilingual OTF packaged as variable fonts. The Monospace variants are separate variable fonts with a weight range from Regular to Bold.
This packaging form provides monolingual subset versions of the fonts. There is a separate font file for each of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Traditional Chinese HK, Japanese, and Korean. If you want to install one language only then this would be the option to consider. It will have the smallest static space requirement. It would also be the choice if you want to use the font on a system that doesn't support the OTC format or can’t use the OpenType ‘locl’ feature to select language.
The region-specific files do not include Monospace versions.
This form has the same fonts as the Region-specific OTF packaged as 5 variable fonts.