Services

Building the Visual Font took a year, because we needed to build the tool to build the tool to built the tool. Hire our expertise and in-house tooling for your projects, and achieve unique outcomes that otherwise takes years of manual effort or months of developer time.

Cantonese Publishing

1. automated jyutping assignment. > 99.5% accuracy, with escape hatch for manual correction. I can help put you in touch with editors to attain absolute correctness.

2. prepare the jyutping+ notation with bespoke styling. Jyutping+ refers to the colors + tone-marks + tone placement that grants additional user-friendliness. Every aspect of the styling can be customized. The output is optimized for PDF/print as flattened graphics, but it can also be as HTML/ePub. The latter, limited by what HTML/CSS markups can do, sacrifice visual control but supports advanced interactivity.

3. supports other romanization schemes. Prefer Yale in the early part of the book, and gradually switch to jyutping? Having both styles? No problem.

4. supports linking char/word fragments with other linguistic parameters. The underlying tooling integrates Hong Kong grade-level / strokes / radical / Mandarin pronunciation / definitions (etc) by default. You can, for example, create grade-level specific reading material that shows pronunciation / definitions only if the char/word is considered difficult / unusual.

5. sophisticated typesetting. Complex displays, for example, having jyutping+ over a character and definition under it, or parallel columns of Chinese-English prose, is not possible with word-processors and very difficult even in InDesign/Quark. I specialize in automating these.

What are some possible uses? I am using this tooling to
(a) prepare a deck of flashcards,
(b) a series of grade-level dependent Zh/Jyutping-En gospels, and more ambitiously,
(c) a by-grade dictionary that additionally shows for each character what words it could form at different grade levels.

Process

We will arrange for an initial meeting for me to know your project / organization. If your requirements are technically feasible, we can then discuss the rates.

Your costs depend primarily on how much custom tooling needs to be built, and secondarily on the nature of the work. The following gives some general examples:

• prepare jyutping+ PDF / HTML (from Chinese text) for a 3,000 words short story using standard styles: US$ 300
• prepare jyutping+ PDF (from Chinese + En text) for a 3,000 words short story with parallel columns: US$ 400
• prepare the short story above, with a 100 word glossary: +$100
• prepare the short story above, with a 100 word glossary, definitions, ranked by usage: +$200

If you are working with a non-profit organization serving the HK diaspora, or if the work is part of a long-term partnership, I can provide up to 20% discount. We may also be able to collaborate on a royalty-sharing basis.

Visual Font Development

Visual Fonts, at their hearts, are high-quality, colored vector graphics packaged into a standard format, that users can access from any applications. When staff in your organization needs to access a repertoire of images repetitively, your organization may benefit from having a set of Visual Fonts custom built.

Process

We will first communicate to look at the artwork / requirements, before arranging for an initial meeting for me to know your project / organization better. If your requirements are technically feasible, we can then discuss the rates.

Your costs depend primarily on how much custom artwork needs to be built, as well as complexity of how the artwork will be accessed. The following gives some general examples:

• 50 well-formatted vector images provided, each of which will be accessed in one simple way: US$ 150
• 50 well-formatted vector images provided, which should be accessible in multiple ways (e.g., within categories, alternative spellings/capitalization): US$ 200
• 50 vector images that needs simple (but bespoke) pre-processing: +$200

Project Help

Our team are interdisciplinary, technical experts, with specialist domain knowledge (e.g., Jon Chui is a PhD chemist) Our technical expertise spans

• code (Elixir / python),
• design/layout (Illustrator/LaTeX),
• info-vis (GIS, tableau), and
• 2D/3D animation (rive, blender)

We can be contracted to help deliver projects on hourly rates or fixed bids.