First Steps

This is a no-frills tutorial to get you start creating works with Jyutping. If you just want to use the Canto Font to read the internet, see the Browsing with Chrome page.

MacOS / Keynote

MacOS has excellent font rendering, and Keynote is the best presentation software. Let’s start here. A starter presentation is prepared for you, which contains instructions and could be used standalone. This is not a presentation for watching; it’s a document that you edit, and in the process of editing learn to use the font. If you get stuck and want some description or video walkthroughs, this is the right place.

If you attempt all the practice exercises, this would take 15 minutes.

Tip

This tutorial references quick_start.key. You can find this in your download under the /starters folder.

• Directoryfonts/

  • …
• Directorystarters

  • quick_start.key
• Directorystylebot/

  • …

1. Getting your first Jyutping

In general, any methods that gets Chinese text into the software would work. In the tutorial we look at three distinct ways that accomplishes the same goal.

1.1 Changing the Font

When you already have existing text, for example, re-visiting work that you did previously, changing the font is the easiest option.

1. Click to select the text
2. from the Format panel, click on the Text tab.
3. Choose VF Cantonese as the font.

Since each glyph contains both the Chinese character and the Jyutping on top, the characters appear 1/3 smaller. If you had an existing design, you may need to scale the font-size to 133%; that is, if you were using font-size 24, scaling it to a new font size of 32 would approximate what you previously had.

Note

If you need to use other fonts alongside Cantonese Font, you can make them blend together by scaling the other font down to around 65%.

Notes on the practices

Changing fonts is straight-forward enough, but if this is the first time you use Canto Font 2, you may be very confused at what you saw. Here are a couple of observations:

• you can apply colors and underline to the font like normal. The colors are applied to the Chinese character. The Jyutping colors are fixed. They are carefully chosen to be readable on both light and dark background, as well as in black-and-white prints.

• |, \, [, and ] are special characters. They serve functional roles and fades into the background.

• Notice that the Jyutping in the first row for 行 is hang4, haang4, and hong4 respectively. Jyutping from the font is context sensitive, benchmarked at 99.7% on modern Traditional Chinese texts.

• The role of |, the word separator, is to break up contexts. This is why 行 are all the same in the second row.

• Braces { } wrapping around a word “translates” it.

You will find out about these more systematically later in the tutorial, and in the How-to section of the documentation.

1.2 Manual Input

Cantonese Font directly changes the appearance of Chinese text; you can use any method to prepare the Chinese text, and the morphing of appearance happens instantly.

Choice of Jyutping IME

TypeDuck and Canto Font forms a particularly potent combination. TypeDuck is an Jyutping input method, developed by a Education University group led by Prof Lau Chaak Ming. It is cross-platform and offers two unique features:

1. explanatory text in English, Urdu, Tagalog and more. That is, if you know the pronunciation but not exactly the writing, you can use the translations to guide you from pronunciation to glyph.
2. fuzzy searching
   • TypeDuck is forgiving on the input. It lets you make little errors and will work with you to guide you to what you might mean.
   • If you have a word / phrase in mind, you can type the initial letter (e.g., dl and it gives you choices such as 大佬, 帶路, and 大路)

1.3 Paste and Match Styles

This is not unique to Keynote; many MacOS apps have the same feature, though non-Apple apps may bind the feature to different keyboard shortcuts.

When you use the Font to read a website (see: Browsing with Chrome), the overall effect is one of “copying the text with Jyutping” into your current document.

2. Overriding Jyutping

2.1 Set Word Boundaries

Canto Font uses the neighbouring characters to help determine the context, which it then use to change the Jyutping. Chinese text, however, do not use spaces to mark what are words, and the font can get confused by what is a word. When I benchmark text for accuracy, this turns out to contribute two-thirds of Jyutping mis-assignments.

The vertical bar symbol |, usually found over the Enter key, is designated as the word separator in Cantonese Fonts. When you add | between two characters, you are making an annotation that these two characters belong to two different words. Adding the word boundaries is often sufficient to guide the font to return the correct Jyutping.

Note

In linguistics, the task of identifying word boundaries is called word segmentation. It is mostly solved for standard written (Simplified) Chinese but remains a research problem for Cantonese text. This is not a problem that can be solved inside a font.

A web-app in the Lab 🧪 area lets you paste text. The app does state-of-the-art Cantonese segmentation and inserts all | for you. This often improves the accuracy from 99.7% to 99.9%. Consider this if you work with texts longer than several hundred characters.

Tip

In hypothetical rare occasions, you may need to break up a pair of characters while wanting to maintain that they are a word. In these cases you can use the \ non-word separator. I conjecture the existence but have never encountered one in the wild; if you see such unicorns, you must let me know!

2.2 Directly Set Jyutping

Cantonese characters can often be pronounced in different ways. You, however, may have one sound in mind. An example may be that you have recorded audio, and wants the Jyutping to match exactly what was spoken.

This is when “directly set Jyutping” can be very helpful; simply append .jyutping to the character to force a specific pronunciation.

Compatilities

This feature is supported only by Apple apps and VectorStyler (both Mac/Win).

If your app vendor does not support mixed-script ligatures (e.g., Microsoft), you may consider using the “copy as PNG” companion web-app to help.

The Cantonese Font includes all known readings for every characters. I have even included all the common “wrong” readings. This means if you are wish to note that 你 nei5 is sometimes “lazy read” as lei5, you can type 你.lei5. Maximum flexibility, minimum opinion.

Alternative syntax

If you type with a Chinese input method, your period . key may be instead bound to the CJK period 。. You do not need to change back to English input; 你。lei5 would work just fine.

Some Chinese input methods change the alphanumeric to their full-width version. When Canto Fonts encounter 。 as the Jyutping command, it will accept either standard-width Jyutping or full-width Jyutping (but not mixed).

Video solution to practices

3. The keyword syntax

I was a teacher before I started working with fonts. With more experience and learnt anticipation, I gradually shifted to a jazzy style where we create and catch teachable moments.

These moments are fleeting. To take advantage of them, you need to not only know the material, but have the tools and visuals ready to go. Here are some tools I built into the Canto Font for you.

For Learners

And if you are learning, use these as conversation starters with your Cantonese friend / parent / teachers! There are often stories that they can tell you.

3.1 Idioms

1,080 idioms, arranged by difficulty of the characters, can be accessed with {idiom: n} or {成語: n}, and the full list can be found in the Reference section.

3.2 Sandwich Puns

425 “sandwich puns” (no particular order) can be accessed with {pun: n} or {歇後語: n}, and the full list can be found in the Reference section.

When you’ve finishing guessing, and wants to reveal the second half, add a ? just before the closing brace. For example, {pun: 38} gives you the first half of 公用電話 (public telephone) and {pun: 38 ?} gives you the second half: 冇錢冇得傾 (no money no talk 😭).

3.3 Final Particles

Cantonese sentences can be modulated in meaning by the final sound. This is known as the final particle. It is not so easy to find a comprehensive list, and even more challenging to find / think of examples for them on the fly. The Cantonese Font includes a (fairly) comprehensive list of 48 particles, that can be accessed with {final: n}. Examples for each particle can be accessed with {final: n ex}.

3.4 Markers

Teachers often want to call attention to particular words or characters, either in the notes, or during a lesson in response to a student’s questions. The Cantonese Font build in a system to help you. This is also useful for preparing bilingual editions.

The tutorial shows you the shorthand {n}/{-n} to inserting markers. The full syntax is {marker: n} and {marker: n close}

Why do I need matching close tags?

Cantonese Fonts implement an invisible markup system, and text created with it can be read programmatically. Using matching tags let you re-use the text for web-pages or professional typesetting, while preserving the call-outs you added.

3.5 Standalone tones

The tone marks can be accessed separately from Chinese characters, using the {tone: n} syntax.

Mixing fonts

Each glyph in the Cantonese Font (Regular) is occupied 1/3 by the Jyutping, and 2/3 by the Chinese character. If you wish to mix other fonts, you will find that they occupy the full height and looks too big. Multiply the font-size by 2/3 will give you better blend.

For example, if you are using font-size 32 pt for Cantonese, and you wish to use Times New Roman for English text alongside, the Times New Roman should be set to 32 x (2/3) = 24 pt.

4. “Translation” by tagging

English and Chinese do not have the same grammatical structure, and what the font does is merely converting individual word into its Chinese equivalent. It is not a real translation.

What this opens up, however, are spontaneous learning opportunities. Have a quick question about what is the Chinese (and Jyutping) of a concept? Type it inside braces. Let us know in the forums what you do with it.

A full list of the vocabulary can be found in the Reference section.

5. Jyutping Toggling 🧪

If you have access to the Lab, there are additional font variants such as No Jyutping and Bold. These were prepared with the same size and shape to the Regular and thus blend seamlessly.

The No Jyutping variant is particularly note-worthy because it was set as a kind-of Italic. This means you can toggle on and off the Jyutping simply by hitting cmd-I on your keyboard. Uses include preparing reading material for intermediate and advanced students who do not need Jyutping on many characters, as well as interactive quizzes on pronunciation of characters.