2.6 had been built and is being delivered to a broader Early Access. This version is considered a release candidate; likely only admitting minor fixes before public release in mid-May. My focus in April will shift to building supporting infrastructure, such as creating documentation in En/Zh-T, managing publicity, communicating with / addressing concerns from Early Access users, and doing exploratory work such that the Lib/Lab programs can be more concrete.
2.6 enjoys broad compatibility, and have been known to work not only on Mac, but also on Win11 (e.g., OneNote, Word) fully colored. It also works on monochrome eReaders.
Font variants
Most Early Access users will have received one full-featured Regular font, corresponding to what is in the Community Edition. 2.6 in its entirety is a complete family of six (Regular is row 4):
If your work needs/benefits from the rest of the variants, and you wish to have access to them before mid-May, please contact me.
If you have had tested a previous version (2.5 and before), and did not get access to 2.6, don’t fret. It’s not your fault, it’s mine. I didn’t keep track of who I’ve talked to over 6 different communication channels. Please ping me.
Compatibility Reports
(I’ll edit this later with how we can crowd-source what features work on which device/OS/app combinations)
but I found the font in Window can’t show in color, but no problem in macbook. is my window desktop too old or some issue in Window? (usually I do the video-editing with my Window desktop) @Suie
What features and whether color shows depends on the Windows version, as well as the application used. From k.k and Carine’s reports, Win 11 / Word and Win 11 / OneNote works. Video editing apps generally don’t pay too much attention to text/font-rendering, and they infrequently get this right.
One experimental feature, that would go into the Lab subscription program, is a companion web-app for the fonts.
This is far from production-ready, but the idea is to empower incompatible OS/apps by letting users type, then copy-paste a transparent PNG/SVG into the application (this is how the text above was prepared).
My eventual goal for this is for video-creators to upload a pair of captions (e.g., as webVTTs), and can download an mp4. The video would
have transparent background, and
render the pair of captions together in the requested style
I have some audio-processing work going on the side; in the super-far future I hope we can have karaoke styled text partially automated. I think those would be super great esp for children’s material.
I used MS word to do tried it out, it works great! Also, you can see attached picture on testing to display in PDF format on a computer WITHOUT the font installed. It works!
Thanks So much!!!
How to install in Windows 10 & 11:
Just double click on the font file, it would open a window and click install (I had highlighted and put an arrow beside it). Voila, it works!
Hi there, testing on a Win10 with MS Word (MS Office Professional Plus 2021) and Adobe Illustrator 2020.
In Word it seems to be only displaying monochrome jyutping, and the phrase matching didn’t work:
(
Hi and welcome Aaron. I am not the best to advise on Win 10, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt. For Win10/Word, you should try to look for a “turn on Standard Ligature” option, which on some versions is off by default. That is necessary for making the context pronunciation work.
As to Adobe: I’ve basically given up on supporting them with the font. Their font rendering engines — each OS and app and version has their own — are all broken, in different ways. VectorStyler is a Illustrator equivalent (without the subscription pricing) that gives you full color and full features on Windows.
PS, in the future (ETA end of summer 2024) there will be a companion (web) app, available under the Lab year-pass, that lets you type and do a “copy to PNG/SVG”. This doesn’t have the flexibility of the font but it’ll give similar output on Win10, Adobe, and Canva/Google Docs.
Hi Jon, is there a place for keeping track of compatibilities across platforms and software that we can all contribute to? A valid the question also is how much effort you and we want to pour into debugging these. I’m in the opinion that the good cross platform compatibility is essential for the success of this project… but I also understand the need to pick our battle with limited manpower.
I’ve tested on browsers using stylebot (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), again on my win10 device. Needed to rename the font-family to “VF Cantonese” instead of “VF Canto v2-3-0” as in the early access guide. It looks great on Chrome and Edge (Chromium-based), but has funny character width issues in Firefox.
I found the ligature part in my Word, but that didn’t help. Neither did checking allow context based formatting. Tried printing to PDF from MS Word (Professional 2021) but it Distiller complained with a log that says could not find font “VF-Canto”. I wonder if there’s some strange naming issue when operating in Windows.
Needed to run so a quick answer. Yes, there is a place for keeping track of compatibilities:
I have not announced this very much yet, and all the Windows are obviously not done. If there is general interest in helping, I can send forth the form I use to populate the tables + instructions. (No obligations: I don’t anticipate takers!)
For Win 10, let me tag in @k.k and @cariney who have more experience on these platforms.
My general sense hearing from y’all is that there is a significant difference between Win 10 (2015) and Win 11 (2021). My inclination at the moment is to advertise as
full compatibility on MacOS
full (b/w) compatibility on Kindle/Kobo
future support for iOS with specialized apps
mostly compatible with Win 11
mostly compatible with latest Ubuntu
And… not what you may want to hear, but
unsupported in pre-2018 operating systems (which would include pre-2018 OSX, and Win 10)
For MS Word, maybe updating to a newer version will help if that is possible. I am using version 2403. Ligature works and files can be exported to PDFs (although the file size of the PDFs is huge, like 40mb for just a few words…)
If you want to create PDFs and you know Python or JavaScript, the following PDF generation packages may be useful until Jon’s web app is available. Ligature works and file size is normal.
Carine mentioned separately there being a “pdf compatibility” setting in the Win/Word export, that trims down the export size dramatically (?). Through all this, I just don’t understand why Microsoft could do these properly but always hide the best practice away from its users. Maybe to preserve backwards compatibility?
Sorry for the slow report… I finally got to loading the v2.6 release as well as the v2.5 release on my Clara 2E. The result is the v2.6 .ttf actually freezes the Clara and causes it to reboot. There must be something in the .ttf that breaking the font rendering pipeline badly. It cannot even render the font name in the font list.
Interestingly using an .otf version of the font allows it to load but the rendered glyphs don’t have any jyutping.
Not quite sure how best to help debug here…
@poohsticks got a suggestion to tag ya…any idea? I almost want to reduce the font down to like 10 characters and test with that first…but I don’t know font tooling. :-/
I just looked up and learnt there’s so many different versions of Kobo! Am I understanding this right?
Kobo Clara 2E + 2.5.ttf
Kobo Clara 2E + 2.6.ttf crashes
Kobo Clara 2E + 2.6.otf does not crash but falls through to some other fonts
Kobo Clara 2E + 2.7.ttf crashes
Kobo Clara 2E + 2.7.otf crashes
If yes, then looking back at the changelog, it is probably one of the following being the culprits:
Cleaning up zero-width non-joiner (removing parts for this one glyph)
Bodies for phantom glyphs (adding paths for all the phantom glyphs)
The strange thing is that these two are essentially opposite operations (albeit on different set of glyphs) . When poohsticks can talk about his Kobo version then we may be able to pin down a little more.
Ping @jkwchui to have access to v2.6
I saw that it might be related to testing on Kindle evoked on Discord but I only have a Kobo (Libra 2) will gladly test once I have access to v2.6.
crashes
does not crash but falls through to some other fonts
. When poohsticks can talk about his Kobo version then we may be able to pin down a little more.