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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

visual-fonts.com

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#161

Post by wincy »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #132
throwaway2037 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none. It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.

Japanese has a lot of “hint” on word (nouns) ending. And they use “full stop” plus one space to end a sentence as comma is not really needed in most cases. This is unlike chinese.

I’ve noticed in things translated from Japanese (video games, anime) there’s two features that seem constant and don’t seem to come from other languages. They seem to constantly say “in other words” and restate and clarify topics, and they put “quotation marks” around things that don’t seem to need quotation marks. I’ve always assumed these oddities would make more sense if I learned to speak or write Japanese.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#162

Post by jkwchui »

jfk13 wrote: post #149
jkwchui wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. Font's author here. You and Jeff are correct in guessing this is (ab)using ligatures maximally :) To satisfy your curiosity, we can go deeper. ---- Conceptually it is simple: 1. assign a default (most likely) sound for each character, 2. loop through contexts, extracting words (char-combos) where the sound is different from the default ("alt-word") 3. create SVGs + font-paths (fallback for incompatible systems…

This is an awesome piece of work - congratulations! I notice you're using OpenType-SVG here; have you investigated whether it would be possible to implement this using COLRv1 (which would potentially result in a lighter-weight font, I suspect, and eventually wider support)? Or are there technical limitations in COLRv1 that make it impossible?

Color fonts really hasn't converged into a standard, and their adoption is slow. OpenType-SVG was accepted 10 years ago, and it was implemented into FreeType only one year ago --- it hasn't even trickled down to most Linux distros (nor is it usable on Windows). I don't see COLRv1 in Win/Mac/Linux until 2026 at the earliest.

But I did try to make it into COLRv1 (as well as COLR/CPAL). The only tools that build COLRv1 right now are the tools from the Google Fonts team; I remember them stalling for hours before saying completion, yet the output was broken (I can't remember how it was broken).

I personally would love to see a COLR/CPAL version, and have some idea on how that could happen. But I probably should be working on some revenue-generating product instead ;)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#164

Post by tikkabhuna »

Happy to see this here. I think there's tons of potential for making Cantonese easier to learn. The big difficulties I've had as an English speaker learning is:

1. Multiple Romanisation formats (Jyutping vs Yale) 2. Many community lead dictionaries with varying completeness. 3. Many web resources for learning words/phrases/etc use a mixture of traditional characters, jyutping, yale, or something else.

Its very difficult to find the content in the format a learner needs. Hopefully something like this will help learners use content written using traditional characters.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#165

Post by ccozan »

gondaloof wrote: post #142
nagarjun wrote: post #118

This is great! Desperately need this for Japanese!

I'm confident that either this already exists in Japanese or that apps/tools can do it. Japanese Children learn Kanji with Furigana, so there are solutions for them. Some examples I found: - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-furigana-phon... - http://www.furiganizer.com/static/about.html - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fmw2IrRUXo

the furiganizer.com website does not seem to work :(

However the third link, with the Mac Pages, really great.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#167

Post by jkwchui »

ackfoobar wrote: post #126
jkwchui wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. Font's author here. You and Jeff are correct in guessing this is (ab)using ligatures maximally :) To satisfy your curiosity, we can go deeper. ---- Conceptually it is simple: 1. assign a default (most likely) sound for each character, 2. loop through contexts, extracting words (char-combos) where the sound is different from the default ("alt-word") 3. create SVGs + font-paths (fallback for incompatible systems…

In the FAQ you mentioned > Unfortunately, without being able to do proper word segmentation, this will remain a limitation. Can the user manually add a zero width space to help?

Technically yes, but the general public probably doesn't have a concept of zero-width space.

(For everyone else wonder what ackfoobar is proposing: let's take the phrase (if you don't read Chinese, just treat them as shapes) 香港地少人多, properly segmented, is 香港.地少.人多. The font treats this incorrectly, because "香港地" is a commonly used fragment, the 地 in the fragment have a special sound, and parsing as 香港地.少.人多 gives a mistaken sound for 地.

Ackfoobar is absolutely correct that we can coerce the correct reading by going 香港[ ]地少人多 --- where the [ ] is an invisible spacer. My contention is that most users don't know how to do that in their favorite word processor.

Someone is probably thinking, could you add "香港地少" as a fragment? Purist says it's not pretty, but I'm a pragmatist, so I did do many of these patching. Doing this or not relies on some acumen as a native speaker, and there were hundreds of these decisions made. This language knowledge would be necessary if someone were to do Mandarin (or Thai or, ...))

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#168

Post by jkwchui »

creamyhorror wrote: post #121
jkwchui wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. Font's author here. You and Jeff are correct in guessing this is (ab)using ligatures maximally :) To satisfy your curiosity, we can go deeper. ---- Conceptually it is simple: 1. assign a default (most likely) sound for each character, 2. loop through contexts, extracting words (char-combos) where the sound is different from the default ("alt-word") 3. create SVGs + font-paths (fallback for incompatible systems…

That is amazing work. You've really plumbed the depths of what's possible with font technology, kudos.

Thank you. Who is really amazing is Simon Cozens, who wrote a set of articles on fonts/global script: https://simoncozens.github.io/fonts-and-layout/

The history of digital fonts added a great deal of complexity to font formats, and without him writing such a concise yet comprehensive guide, I would have been stuck for even longer.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#169

Post by jkwchui »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #164

Happy to see this here. I think there's tons of potential for making Cantonese easier to learn. The big difficulties I've had as an English speaker learning is: 1. Multiple Romanisation formats (Jyutping vs Yale) 2. Many community lead dictionaries with varying completeness. 3. Many web resources for learning words/phrases/etc use a mixture of traditional characters, jyutping, yale, or something else. Its very diffic…

(Font author here)

I whole-heartedly agree. I am a native speaker, and "fluent" in jyutping, yet I have such a hard time with Yale.

One service I'm going to build is a mapping tool between {R1, R2, ...Rn} and {G1, G2, ...Gn} where R is romanization method and G are y/z-variants of glyphs. (These, for the most part, already exists inside packages I built for building the font, and just need to have an UI to expose it to the world.) It would sure save me lots of time trying to read Matthews-Yip...

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#170

Post by jkwchui »

pleasedontsell wrote: post #7
kelvie wrote: post #3

Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?

Maybe it uses font ligatures to change based on the surrounding characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)

You are correct!
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