Font Engineering

• You specialize in type design, and wish to extend your offering with OpenType features that make your fonts come alive;
• your font isn’t working right on some platforms and you’re not sure why;
• you have a Latin font and wish to add CJK coverage so it is consistent across device and platforms.
• you drew a minority language script, and look for user adoption in the decade before getting a Unicode codepoint and input-method support.

Working with font compilers, font formats, and shapers and renderers is a special skillset. Visual Fonts are the most ambitious dynamic color fonts ever produced, and we can be your partner in making your fonts stand out from the crowd, or just solving those pesky font issues.

Process

We will first communicate to look at the feature / 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.

Bespoke Font

• You have a business case where rapid access to a fixed library of graphics by from a keyboard input is valuable
• You wish to customize the Cantonese Font (or one of the other Visual Fonts)

Working with font compilers, font formats, and shapers and renderers is a special skillset. You can commission a font that is built just for your organization.

Process

Projects in this category varies greatly and so is the cost. 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:

• you provide vector art (hundreds) in the exact format, as well as a syntax for access; we help cast into a font: 2 days
• you provide vector art that does not match what fonts require (e.g., dimension incorrect, contains uses of symbols), or need us to craft the syntax: add 6-14 days
• we manage the entire production: depends on complexity of project and to what extent the job can be automated. Greenfield projects with 1,000+ artwork can take 12 months or more.
• custom Cantonese Font (e.g., based on open source CJK font typeface / Latin typeface): 3 days

We will first communicate to look at the feature / 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.

Cantonese Publishing

• your school have a large collection of intellectual property, and wish to upgrade them with tone-mark enhanced Jyutping
• you are publishing a book, and wish to prepare narrated versions and make them available in multi-format ePub and PDF
• you want your Jyutping-annotated works to be available in graded versions
• you wish to prepare narration for your work, time-synchronized with bilingual, segmented subtitles
• you have a Cantonese linguistics research project
• you wish to prepare design works with commercial typeface

In addition to deep computational and linguistics expertise, we can tap into our networks to provide writing, design, voice-acting, and translation. Our vast collections of in-house tooling and data can reduce time-to-production by 99%, from years to weeks.

Typical Commercial Rates

• Jyutping annotation (99.9%+ accuracy): USD $0.2 / character
• Professional VO: USD $0.2 / character
• Segmentation + automatic hinting: USD $0.2 / character
• Translation: USD $0.2 / character
• text-audio synchronization: USD $0.2 / character

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.