About

The Cantonese Font

Credits & Thanks

The Cantonese Font relies on preceding works, and I enjoyed generous help, on both the language and the technology.

Language

• Words.hk 粵典. The decade-long effort of this group, and their willingness to make their data open-usage, make it possible to identify the contexts of Cantonese usage.
• Prof Qin Lu’s group at Poly U, who had assembled dictionary readings for characters
• KT Shek 石見田 (pseudonym) who not only digitized every dictionary with Cantonese pronunciations, but also added recommendations for other usages, and provided a very convenient source of usage at jyut.net.

Type

• Chiron 昭源 Font & Adobe-Google Source/Noto 思源. The Cantonese Font uses Chiron as the CJK font face, which was in turn built over Source/Noto.
• Fira (GO), whose tall x-height made it fit well for the Jyutping.
• Georg / Rainer from Glyphs had entertained many of my eccentric asks.
• Simon Cozens, whose handbook on OpenType programming was indispensible in my ab initio learning of the arcane arts of fonts.

Contributors

• Nathan Hammond, who provided the performant draw code for individual glyphs, reducing what would have taken weeks of processing down to seconds; his insights and enthusiasm also got the project through its toughest time
• Albert Wong, who wrote an Elixir bridge for jieba-rs, enabling Yue segmentation for the web apps

Supporters

• v1 supporters, whose feedback and encouragements kept up morale; and morale is essential for the long lonely slog. Special call out to Seraph, who used v1 for his weekly classes at Cantonese Alliance.
• Eli Sanchez Arteaga, the Lilo that kept the grumbly eccentric Stitch from self-destructing; Eli Sanchez Tango which funded the open-ended (but thankfully “only” two years) development.

A Brief History

In 2017 I hand-drew the first design to help students visualize the tones and as reminder that the finals are not plosive. That same year, I ran a Cantopop through the Ages workshop whose centrepiece was interactive, bi-lingual, Jyutping-annotated lyrics for some 15 songs. That was tedious, and I was appalled at how bad the tooling was.

I standardized the drawings into an Adobe Illustrator template, and for the next few years, just re-used whatever I had built. One of my students worked with 粵典 Words.hk and helped connect me. I found PyCantonese. It was version 2, and I watched it grew into version 3, and thought there was a path forward.

2019 to 2022 was a whirl. Many people left Hong Kong, and I knew that learning/teaching in the diaspora community would meet the same bumps as I did. As a career teacher leaving the Hong Kong education system, I thought I would just “solve the Cantonese problem” in the most excellent way, while soul-searching for what’s next. How hard could it be?

It turns out that PyCantonese of 2022-2023 just wasn’t good enough. Fonts are fickle; everything must be perfect. Fonts really don’t want to be this smart. CJK fonts poses special pain. Color fonts poses extra special pain. Attacking all of these obscure, poorly charted paths at the same time, while unemployed and unemployable, in a project that is maybe-sensitive and definitely-unfundable, is some kind of special hell with extra anguish and no way out.

In May 2023, v1 (Boundary) was released. It definitely pushed at the boundaries of what was considered technically possible, and was well received in the technical world. As a Cantonese tool it’s as good as we could get, but that was not good enough. The critical flaw was that there was no way to override pronunciations; and with the building pipeline I used there was no way to solve this. In the Cantonese teaching/learning world, it was met with cruel but well-deserved indifference.

You always need luck. Shipping products and shooting for new projects improves your luck. Nathan got in touch for a related-but-different project, and for that contributed a new and much faster way of preparing individual (single character) glyphs. It took me a few weeks to realize this solves the “no override” problem in v1 — if I scrap everything and start over from zero.

Grindingly yet miraculously the rebuild comes together, and by Feb 2024 it became clear that v2 is happening and should be called 蒲飛 Pokfield. (Yes, the versions are all HKG street names.) 蒲飛 is the transliteration of the street, and it is also transliteration of Buffet. With 100% readings of 100% characters, an override mechanism, and hidden features from En <-> Zh bidirectional “translation”, there is everything Cantonese here, for people to take what they need.

What can’t v2 do? For song and dance you’ll have to wait for v3, Sycamore 詩歌舞.

---