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Guide for Canto Font v2 Early Access
last updated: 2024-03-05 Thank you for your interest in Canto Font v2. In this (hopefully short) article, I hope to give you an overview of What, Why, and How for the font, and what you can do as an early yser / tester to move the project forward. What Problem This Solves People say “Cantonese… Read more
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Logo Designs
I drew the Visual Fonts logo and Eli Tango logos around the same time (2022 Summer). Like Eli and I, they are superficially different but deeply similar. Very interesting when they are put next to one another, and quite a departure of style as the logo for jon.hk (2018). Both designs describes the essences of… Read more
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Font-embedded “Translation”
An interesting after-thought in Boundary (Canto Font v1, released 2023-May) was the English-Chinese phrasebook: The motivation was that locations in Hong Kong are often named wildly differently in Chinese and English, and there’s no easy way for, say, an English-only person to learn that Admiralty maps to gam1 zung1 (“gold bell”). For the curious: Admiralty… Read more
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Invisible Markup within Fonts
Cantonese Font v2 has an intricate system of OpenType features. The strangest part is what I call the Invisible Markup. The Problem Cantonese (to a lesser extent Mandarin, and perhaps other Sinitic languages) breaks the (English) common expectation that the writing uniquely informs the semantic. In Cantonese, there are situations where the combination of written script and… Read more
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First take at Cantonese Speech-to-Jyutping
This is a proof-of-concept for Cantonese speech-to-text-to-jyutping. Wiring this up took… five minutes; Elixir / Nx / Livebook is a really superb combination. The first minute of the video is colorful narration, with the technological magic starts at 1:15. (The prose is a classic internet prose, from maybe twenty years ago, called 壞過凱婷 Worse than Hoi Ting. The… Read more
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On the Eve of Canto Font v2
At 13:37, Friday 2th Feb 2024, the Cantonese Font v2 (Pokfield 蒲飛) was first built correctly, with the version number of 2.0.20.2. This was such a monumental moment for me, and such a relief. Started mid-2022, most of the last 21 months was best characterised as stumbling in a dark maze which probably have no exit. My… Read more