Easy,
Save Hours,
Fun Personal Lessons
Font Variants Used
Regular / Bold / No Jyutping / Large Jyutping
Version Showcase
2.5
The Cantonese Font was partly built to scratch my itch. I am a fluent native speaker, comfortable with computers and skilled in illustration, but making readable Jyutping for students just takes so much time. With each annotation took so long — is it right? isn’t it placed too high than the last line? — Jyutping-text wasn’t possible to create on-the-fly. I want to personalize materials but I couldn’t. Teachable moments slip away.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just Summon Jyutping? Yes, now we can.
Let’s Write and Edit
You work with beginner and advanced learners, each needing something different from you. You would like to write and have the Jyutping comes along effortlessly, but tools you’ve tried were too slow, not accurate, missing characters, expensive — or all of the above. The Canto Fonts can help.
Fast
Add a character and the Jyutping comes immediately. Add 5,000 characters and the Jyutping still comes immediately.
We tap into font rendering, deep in the sub-conscious of machines and one of the most optimized process.
No app is this fast.
Accurate
20,000 characters’ worth of Jyutping from diverse works were checked character-by-character to provide benchmarks. Just using the font regularly exceeds 99.7%, and by first assigning word boundaries with our web-app brings this up to 99.9%.
No other tool even claims to be accurate.
Complete
You teach colloquial Cantonese. Great! That’s what the font is tuned for.
You teach classical poems. No problem.
The font lets you express 100% readable sounds for 100% readable characters.
Let’s Prepare
You plan lessons, prepare notes, and develop exercises. You want to make fresh, current material that speaks to your current students, not students from fifteen years ago. You want the same material to be adaptable for students who wants to learn to write, and those who just want to speak. The Canto Fonts can help.
Versatile
You need notes in LibreOffice Write. Use the font.
You make complex art in VectorStyler. Use the font.
You make slides in Keynote. Use the font.
You make sheet music in MuseScore. Use the font.
Read the Web
By setting appropriate styles in Chrome, you can get Jyutping for everything Chinese.
Tune to Spotify lyrics and sing along to your student’s favorite Canto-pop.
Read today‘s news articles.
Progress
Regular and No-Jyutping variants mixes freely, with the Jyutping toggledsimply with ctrl/cmd-I (like Italics). Easily adapt to your student’s progress.
Large Jyutping for students who not aiming for reading / writing.
Heritage to bridge towards classic print type-face and venerable LSHK presentation.
Let’s Teach
You have your plans, but you also want to flow spontaneously. Jyutping created so much friction that you couldn’t do any live interactions with your kid or students. Sometimes you just need quick reminders. Or maybe you want to cultivate curiosity, helping your students to learn to explore. The Canto Fonts can help.
{Translate}
The font lets you {translate} English words by tagging them inside {braces}.
On top of 3,000 words (in every inflection and conjugations), the vocabulary includes countries, major cities, faiths, as well as locales in Hong Kong.
And it goes backwards from Chinese to English. What activities can you think of?
Culture
Built into the font are cultural elements; for example, there are over 1,000 idioms that can be summoned by simply typing {idiom: 234}. The number represents the difficulty of the characters.
Grammar
Students learn 隻 and 個, and asks what else are there. Just type {measure: n} for an instance. Add ex for an example, and ? for a brief explanation.
Coming in 2.7: final particles.
What’s Available
Community Edition
The Community Edition includes:
- Regular Cantonese Font (color and b/w)
- Heritage Cantonese Font
- Chrome Stylebot styles
These are full-featured products with the 100% readings / 100% characters / 99.7% accuracy; usable in many applications, OS, and devices; and includes all of the {translate}, culture, and grammar elements.
We suggest a sponsorship of US$ 28, to help recoup R&D costs of this innovative-monumental undertaking, and funds future Cantonese projects. However, we do not want financial hardship to block your access to Cantonese, so there are discount codes up to 100% reduction available.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: MacOS 10.15 or higher, or Windows 11. Up to 250 Mb of free disk space. Check for compatibilities with your specific applications here.
Sponsorship Year Passes
Library
Cantonese Font opens up a vast field of pedagogically useful content. Well-designed, print-ready (but editable) lessons; multilingual books, audio, and videos; Anki decks; games, and more.
With the Library year pass ($ 40), you sponsor four of these items getting made, at a cadence of one every three months. In exchange, you get downloadable access as the works are completed, and the downloads are yours to keep. From the get-go you have access to
- narrated, bilingual Animals-101 eBook + printables, and
- narrated, bilingual Gospel of Matthew, in multiple formats
These are sold separately for $10 and $25 respectively. The final collection is expected to sell for $100 or more.
Laboratory
I built specialist tools to create the Cantonese Fonts and other cutting-edge content. With the Laboratory year pass ($ 40), you sponsor packaging up four of these items for general use, at an expected cadence of one every three months.
In exchange, you get advanced access to software that can be downloaded (such as fonts), and ongoing access to what needs to run on a server. From the get-go you have access to
- the full complement to the Regular font, including
- Bold,
- No Jyutping (that can be toggled as Italic)
- Large Jyutping, and
- Only Jyutping
I expect to develop a “copy to transparent PNG/SVG” web app for Fall 2024. This makes it easy to work on devices and software that do not support advanced fonts.