The Many Pokfield Fonts
Cantonese Font v2 (code-name Pokfield) comes in collections. Each complete collection contains six fonts, with the same CJK font face:
- large jyutping / fluid width
- regular jyutping / fluid width
- regular jyutping / narrow fixed width (standard)
- selective regular jyutping / narrow fixed width
- small jyutping
- no jyutping
Four collections are planned:
- Hei 黑體 (based on Chiron Sans)
- Sung 宋體 (a heritage-form like 1.Ming)
- Jyunsaai Kai
- (my favorite but commercial type)
for a total of 6 x 4 = 24 Pokfield fonts.
Some collections, restricted by upstream licensing, will always remain private (e.g., “my favorite but commercial type”). Fonts that are publicly available will be under SIL Open Font 1.1 licensing, making it eligible for commercial use.
How the Fonts will be Available
Community Edition
In May 2024, Pokfield will be available to the public at www.visual-fonts.com. Like v1-Boundary, the Community Edition will be available with a suggested sponsorship of US$ 25, but only pay-if-you-can. The Community Edition will be the feature-complete (incl. the cultural images / En-Zh dictionary) standard single font. This font will be Noto Sans / regular jyutping / fixed width. (It may also be possible to include an I.Ming-based serif / regular jyutping / fixed width.[^licensing between SIL/IPA needs to be resolved, as well as technical metric issues.]
I will also notify ($20+) sponsors of Boundary, and make the Community Edition available to them with no extra cost.
Extras
To give incentives for financially supporting the project, there will also be an option to make a US$ 40+ sponsorship and get extras. The extras are not confirmed yet, but will likely be
- a complete collection of Hei 黑體, and
- credits for web services
The complete collection will be helpful for users that work with learners of different levels, where at the beginning the emphasize may be on the sound (using the Large Jyutping variant), and gradually transition to good character recognition and showing jyutping only for some characters (using a mix of Small Jyutping and No Jyutping).
The selective standard font variant automates the above, by providing jyutpings only for (Hong Kong) grade 3 and above, non-standard reading characters.
Web services
This is to be confirmed, and likely rolled out over summer 2024 – fall 2025. Some of the web services I have in mind include:
-
PNG / SVG generation. I frequently don’t need a full document, but just a quick snippet of an image with text+Jyutping that I can paste, and preferably with a transparent background. This service will provide a place to input some text, formatting options (font-faces, colors), and render and provide a Copy As… button for bringing that image into the clipboard, and a Save As button for keeping the image on disk.
-
Audio speech-to-markup. Taking audio upload as input, and returning a markup document that can be rendered with the Cantonese Font.
-
Video closed captioning. Taking video upload as input, do speech-to-markup. Let user intervene as necessary, then burn captions to video.
Farther out is a jyutping-based text-to-speech model, which would enable
- markup-to-audio.
Image generation can be made freely available to Extras supporters, possibly perpetually. The other services might be expensive in compute and needs to run on a credit system.
Upgrades to v3-Sycamore and Beyond
Sycamore Fonts (late 2025, if ever completed!) should be a drop-in replacement for Pokfield. It will likely be an invisible upgrade with no extra payment / fanfare.
Commissioning Custom Fonts
Publishers or commercial users may have brand colors or fonts, and wish to commission custom fonts. Your cost will depend on how complex the request is, and billing is per days of development. As a rough estimate, a new font with the same feature / different design will be around US$ 5,000, with a 10-days turnaround.