Cantonese Font for Creatives

The Barrier

Cantonese has a reputation of being a hard language, or even The Hardest Language to learn. I disagree. The language isn’t hard; Cantonese is just frustrating to learn because there’s no accessible learning material.

A new learner may want English-Jyutping/Chinese (non-textbook) books to read. In 2023, (for a language with 86,000,000 native speakers!) there were only 71 of these books. 40 were pamphlets from the Hambaanglaang series which are now out-of-print. All were children’s books. Only one full-length Jyutping-Chinese story-book exists, The Little Prince. There were essentially no dual spoken Cantonese / Jyutping and English subtitled videos.

Cantonese is made “hard”, and the reputation of being a “hard language” blocks new learner. Assertion as a “dying language” removes incentives for learning, and indifference make it hard for creators like you to sustain financially doing what you love. This was a terrible predicament.

My vision of the Cantonese Font System is to unblock your most tedious, most uncertain process, and make your creations accessible to generations of new audience.

With the Cantonese Font, you get romanizations “for free,” often in the creative software you are already using. Permissive licensing means that you can freely use the fonts in your commercial projects, with the comfort of mind that you can use the fonts perpetually.

“Few English/Chinese/Jyutping works existed” becomes a great advantage for you: there is a whole new continent to discover and settle. Take the fonts, make something wonderful, amaze your audience. Make studying Cantonese attractive and make a good living doing what you love.

What can you make?

You should read this section bearing in mind that I am a chemist, dancer, and font engineer. You can do far far better than me 🙂

With Just the Fonts

Design & Illustration

My recommendation is to go with VectorStyler. VectorStyler is an Illustrator-replacement (opens Illustrator files 🥳) BUT with first-class typography and perfect font rendering. This young Finnish company built a font renderer from scratch and got right what Adobe and Microsoft couldn’t. VectorStyler is available as very reasonable one-time purchase.

The next two panels are short tutorials showing how quickly you can do type-art, which makes children’s books much more appealing. Being vector art, what you create are versatile and can be printed at any resolution, and can be exported for use in other vector (e.g., Rive, Affinity Publisher) or raster applications (e.g., Photoshop).

Cantonese Fonts are the most demanding fonts ever crafted, and tests font renderers to the extreme. Applications that do not implement the standards correctly will see broken parts (depending on how they implemented the standards wrongly!) Adobe have the least consistent font rendering, and practically none of the plethora of renderers in any of their apps on any platform work. Go complain to them, but they’ve never fixed any of the tickets I’ve submitted!

Animated Type

Being “just type,” text with the Cantonese Font can easily be animated. The above was created on Mac/Keynote. These can be used on their own to promote other works, or for making narrated stories on YouTube or social media; they can be exported as transparent mp4s for further composition in Final Cut or Adobe Premiere Pro.

With Typesetting

Service available Fall 2024

The fonts is the tip of the iceberg in the Cantonese Production System. By implementing the Cantonese Markup, you can use automations that help you pre-process the text (e.g., by marking up word boundaries and tagging proper nouns), and your edits in word processors can be consumed downstream programmatically.

What does it mean to you as an author with a story to tell? Let’s look at the two parallel universes:

In addition to being 10 times faster (and 10 times less headaches), having markup gives you better quality and more flexible output. Typesetting Chinese text is not trivial. The Cantonese Production System, coupled with our two decades of expertise in typesetting the most ambitious works, lets you integrate

• footnotes,
• bibliography,
• cross-references,
• tables,
• illustrations,
• margin notes,
• glossaries

The modular nature of what we built means that you can now

• prepare multiple parallel bi-lingual editions
• prepare multiple reader-specific editions
• adapt Jyutping and typography beyond what the Cantonese Fonts can do
• output to a variety of formats to meet your readers where they are

You do not need to choose between an interactive web version for your subscriber-only members area, or a print-oriented PDF, or a eReader .ePub format. The work you do goes towards all of these formats.

Extra Support

Service available Fall 2024

Producing your creative work is what you want to do, but the work of a creative do not stop there. You need your audience to know about your existence.

• The “Copy-to-PNG / Copy-to-SVG” web-app in the Visual Fonts Lab make it easy for you to create social media updates.
• The Visual Fonts Directory and Blog helps feature and connect your new creation with readers that already love Jyutping-annotated works