Concerning the Character for Jyutping Cycler

Cantonese Font
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(Unrelated content moved to Suggestions Related to Glyph Design since I didn’t expect the discussion about Jyutping cycler to be lengthy.)

Are you going to take up ~ or ～ in the next version? I use them a lot in text. I believe you should use ` instead.

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3.0 is a long way away (if plausible at all), but yes, some of the suggestions here relates to how the base font and SVG glyphs are constructed, and changes to the pipeline is not feasible for the v2 series.

～ and ~ are the “next Jyutping” cyclers in 2.8. The cycling behaviour can be broken with

  1. a space,
  2. a zero-width word segmentation marker |, or
  3. the non-word segmentation marker \

The latter two are subsumed and invisible.

The most important reason for a “next Jyutping” cycler to exist is that it gives alternate reading access for Windows (and other font shapers that breaks up mixed ligatures). The chosen symbol must be classified as a CJK character. ` is considered a Latin character, and will not lead to the desired behaviour on Windows.

Before settling on ~, I’ve tested a number of CJK punctuations, but they are either

  • frequently used (，、。)
  • semantically very odd to occur in isolation (e.g., 』】〕),
  • hard for English-typing US keyboard people to access (significant number of users will NOT be on a Chinese IME; and without a Chinese IME, most of the CJK punctuations are hard to access!), or
  • have too many similar-looking variations (e.g., the numerous dots • · ‧ ･ ・). Dots also have the undesirable behaviour of undergoing substitutions when used consecutively

Once you take into account all these factors, the ~ pair is the only one that actually passes all the criteria.

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Wait – do you mean ~ or ～ or both? Isn’t the former a Latin character?
I don’t know how Windows classifies characters, but despite the former being in the Basic Latin Unicode block, isn’t the script of both characters “Common”, with general category being “Math Symbol”?

Do symbols like @#$%^&* work?

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And, is the Jyutping cycler stable? What if pronunciations are being added to a character in future versions?

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isn’t the script of both characters “Common”, with general category being “Math Symbol”?

In theory it should be but in practice it isn’t. All of @#$%^&* are Latin (per Windows) except if they have a full-width equivalent (which IIRC only exists for @).

do you mean ~ or ～ or both?

On Windows it has to be ～ since this is a CJK punctuation. On Mac… I convert all the half-width ~ to full-width, so it doesn’t actually matter. (And strange enough, you’d think that having converted to full-width, you could use either in Windows… but no.)

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All visible characters in the Basic Latin block have their fullwidth equivalent in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block.

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It is definitely not technically stable. I recommend this Jyutping cycling as a last-resort.

At the same time, I don’t anticipate there being lots of changes; any changes in the v2 series will be appended so they do not disrupt existing sequences.

v3 (if it ever comes out) will be breaking. I think that is justified for a major version, and the old v2 will still be available in the product for people who have lots of legacy documents.

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Not that I can easily type with TypeDuck :wink:

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You toggle between halfwidth and fullwidth symbols with Ctrl+Shift+3 in Windows. On macOS, Ctrl+Shift+3 activates halfwidth and Ctrl+Shift+4 activates fullwidth.

Just for your reference, here is the list of all punctuation and symbols you can type in Windows:

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(At least in Windows, ｀＠＃＄％＆＊ are all equivalently as easy to type as ～.)