Jon Chui Cantonese is regarded as one of “the most difficult language to learn” due to its tonal nature, the standard romanization scheme (Jyutping) representing tones with an arbitrary number, use of non-standardised ideographic glyphs, diglossia, and complex grapheme-phoneme mappings that cannot be accurately automated. For a language with 86 million speakers, only one full-length book with phonetic guidance was available.
The Cantonese Font is a superfamily of color CJK typefaces. It solved the intractable linguistics problem with an intricate-yet-simple system of OpenType features, attaching correct Jyutping at > 99.5% accuracy and 100% glyph coverage, while requiring no network connection, and runs in real-time even on a Kindle. Each Jyutping is supported by intuitive tone-marks, coloured by components, and carefully parametrised metrics solves the layout problem of placing irregular length alphanumeric characters against fixed width CJK characters.
The Font embeds a cultural library (idioms, sayings, and a 4000 word English-Chinese dictionary); a markup system to assist simultaneous production of print, web, and multimedia; a pedagogical system for progressively learning ideograms; a real-time toolkit for teachers; and hooks into an ecosystem of pre- and post-processing linguistics (e.g., word segmentation) and production (e.g., parts-of-speech assignment) tools.
Released for just over a year, creators uses the Font to prepare full-length parallel Cantonese-Jyutping-English novels, children’s books, newsletter, textbooks, Gospels, interactive radio drama, social media promotion, and video subtitles. The Font was enthusiastically adopted by NGOs, schools, and universities in Hong Kong, PRC, USA, and Canada, finding uses in Chinese education (especially valuable for ethnic minorities and heritage learners), linguistics, and broadcasting, as well as unexpected places like non-verbal autism education, musicology, and Braille preparation. The Cantonese Font shows how type brings together form and function to create positive changes in the world.