Example Scenarios

Here are a couple of example scenarios that can be achieved with the Cantonese Font. The scenarios are presented as “day-in-the-life” from the perspective of different fictional characters.

Leo teaches

I have been teaching Kitty for two months. Kitty is 8 years old, and loves rabbits and stories. Their family is going on a road-trip next month, so I thought I’ll make some slides to help tell the story of three bunny siblings traveling.

Making slides for one lesson just wasn’t feasible. It used to take me 15 minutes just to finesse the letters over the characters for a paragraph. (Embarrassingly, I sometimes get the Jyutping wrong too; the -oe and -eo always trip me up.) With the Canto Fonts, this is so fast and effortless: I just write the story, and all aspects of the Jyutping is dealt with. I could even animate the text 🤯

Kitty loves the colors and bunnies. When I “flicked” the Jyutping on and off, she giggled. Then she asked why hung4 hung2 dei2 was written with the same character!

What was surprising was how enthusiastic the parents are. Kitty was fluent with reading Jyutping, with or without the tone marks, but for the parents, it’s the first time that what we do in class makes sense. They asked for some printed notes (easy), and have been telling all their friends.

Cathy learns

I am a second-generation Canadian, who spoke Cantonese with my dad at home. I never had much interest until I’m settling down, but it’s a small town and the learning is mostly on my own. I read only a few Chinese words, and really needed the Jyutping.

I am not very technical, but installing the font took literally three clicks and 15 seconds. I then installed the browser extension, and I was shocked at how much stuff is now available to me. I could read most of the Cantonese Wikipedia, and I can sing along to Cass Phang songs. The Large Jyutping style is really great for me, and I am picking up a few more written characters.

There is supposedly a translation function, but when I don’t know what something means I just use the “copy-as-image” app to WhatsApp a picture to my dad. He doesn’t know Jyutping but he can just read the characters. What was really fun was when I showed him the “sandwich puns”. 牛皮燈籠 he could give the second half right away; others seem to transport him fifty years back in time (and these are sooo non-PC). I didn’t know the Cantonese Font was going to be fun for the whole family.

Angelo preaches

I am a missionary who will be in Hong Kong for four more years. In the last year, I have been writing down where I hear in my own way; the numbers for tones never made sense to me. I found the Cantonese Font and it just clicked.

Living in Hong Kong, I need to communicate with locals. I once got on a taxi but the driver didn’t understand when I said Admiralty. With the “translate” feature in the font, I found out that Admiralty is (somehow) gam1 zung1; no wonder he didn’t understand me. Now that I discovered the “translate” feature (I still don’t understand how a font can do this), I am going to use it to learn a few words every week, in my own time.

What was a delightful surprise was the Book of Matthew in the Library. The one-slide-per-verse, English and Chinese and Jyutping and audio was exactly what I needed to learn in my own time, and I printed the PDF for study. I have been looking for something like this, and everyone say it doesn’t exist. Now we just need the rest of the Bible done this way!

Kim writes books and Pim writes code

I am Kim, an author and artist, and Pim is my partner, who is good with computers. Pim had assured me that it is impossible to convert Cantonese to Jyutping accurately, and the look of his face when I showed him a font could do it was priceless. I don’t think he was too happy 😸

I have been writing and illustrating an 80 pages, bilingual short story collection in colloquial Cantonese, and the Font had taken out the most tedious part. A problem I had was that I put the Jyutping over the characters manually in Illustrator: it looks great for print, but I cannot get it in other formats.

Pim discovered that the Cantonese Font embeds an invisible markup system and provides an app that parses what I write into a json data file. He spent the afternoon writing some code, and now I do the same work that I always do, but it can now go to a eBook and my subscription website. He says that, with a little bit of re-writing, we could even narrate the stories into subtitled YouTube videos. I think he is the super-fan now.

Artists and devs need to eat too. Effortless creation, more ways of selling, easier promotion. We can use the Fonts forever, the price is totally fair, and we don’t feel we’re renting from rent-seekers (which seems to be the case everywhere these days). What’s not to like?