How to override Jyutping

While the Canto Font uses the context to make very good guesses, there are occasions where you need to correct a Jyutping. This page describes how you can do that. For details of why this is necessary, and what is the best method, see the discussion in the Explanation section.

Method 1: Add Word Boundaries

The first thing you should try when encountering unexpected Jyutping is to add word boundaries. For example, the phrase 學生會好好 produces 會 wui2 because the Font matches / interprets this as 學生會 好好 (“student union is very good”). You, however, mean to say “students will be very good” 學生 會 好好.

What you can do is to use the | (vertical bar, found over the Enter key on US keyboard layout) to manually tell the font what constitute a word. (In the Canto Font, this | character is purely functional and not displayed.)

With our previous example, adding the bar in the following manner will give you the 會 wui5 that conveys your meaning 學生|會|好好.

Tip

In very rare cases, you may wish to break up a “word” without introducing a new word. In these cases you can use the \ backslash as a non-word separator.

Method 2: Direct override

Some cases are not related to word boundaries. For example, the final particle 喎 can be read as wo3, wo4, or wo5, and it is the combination of glyph and pronunciation that gives the meaning. The meaning of the sentence 小明做晒功課喎 is undefined until the pronunciation of 喎 is fixed, and as much as Canto Font is magical, it doesn’t read minds. Word boundaries (method 1) also does not apply here.

In these cases, you can use the .jyutping syntax. Simply type a period ., followed by the Jyutping you want; the annotation changes the Jyutping of the previous character and is itself subsumed.

Caution

Support for direct override places special demands on the font renderer. Whether it works is thus strongly dependent on the operating system and application. There is full support for most apps in MacOS, but only in VectorStyler on Windows 11.

Tip

If you type with a Chinese input method like TypeDuck, 倉頡, or 速成, your . key may instead give you a 。 and the alphanumeric might be full-width characters.

For your convenience, 。jyutping also works and if a 。 is used, it will take either half-width or full-width characters.