Installation & Compatibility

Installation

MacOS

To install the fonts, first unzip the package.

Then, right-click (2-finger tap on MacBooks) on the VF-Cantonese.ttf file, and choose Open in Font Book.

Finally, click install at the font preview. (Repeat the above process for the Phrasebook mode as necessary.)

To uninstall (may be needed for updates, or just to free up disk space), open the Font Book application. The easiest way is with Spotlight (cmd-space) then type Font Book. Look for VF Cantonese, right-click (2-finger tap) and choose Remove.

MacOS

MacOS has supported the technology since 10.14 Mojave (2018). The following applications are known to work:

iWork: Pages for documents, Numbers for Spreadsheet, and Keynote for presentation

MS Office: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Your version of Office may have “standard ligatures” disabled by default; if the jyutping is not context-sensitive, that would be why.

LibreOffice: Writer, Calc, and Presentation. OpenType ligatures are not support by default in Drawer.

Sketch.app, design app (local)

Chrome, browser. Together with the StyleBot extension, and per-site configuration, it is possible to browse the internet with jyutping. A starter set of StyleBot configuration files is provided inside the package, inside the /chrome-stylebot/ folder. After installing the StyleBot extension, go to the Settings of the extension and import the stylebot_backup.json file. You should now be able to read zh.wikisource.org with jyutping.

Edge, browser

⚠️ Final Cut Pro. By default, color fonts are not supported and only the monochrome fallback will appear. Support for full color is possible ✅ using a free plugin by FxFactory called Manifesto.

⚠️ Adobe apps uses their own renderer. Visual Fonts work on 2019-2022 versions, but is broken in an 2023 update. Color fonts are shown but with stretched proportions.

⚠️ Firefox, Safari.

Linux

Linux distros often uses FreeType as the font-rendering engine, and FreeType introduced OpenType-SVG support in version 2.12 (released 2022 Apr). As a result, slowly trickling downstream to different distro & applications. You can check whether your combination is supported here.

Ubuntu supports Visual Fonts since 22.04 (Kinetic) released in, err, 2022-04.

Windows

I don’t have a windows machine, so I have no advice here. Early reports from testers suggest that

🚫 Microsoft Office

⚠️ LibreOffice. Only monochrome, no color.

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