The Chinese typewriter
latimes.com
The Chinese typewriter
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#2The video doesn't play, here's one found on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014
This one is a more advance "semi-automatic" version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#3Not knowing a thing about Chinese writing, it seems bit odd that no sort of character compositing system was utilized. Wikipedia has a mention of a "Ming Kwai Nao Can typewriter" which apparently had some novel character compositing, but apparently it didn't gain popularity, at least in China.
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#4Not knowing a thing about Chinese writing, it seems bit odd that no sort of character compositing system was utilized. Wikipedia has a mention of a "Ming Kwai Nao Can typewriter" which apparently had some novel character compositing, but apparently it didn't gain popularity, at least in China.
There's so few characters for which this would work reliably that it's basically pointless, plus it would require two or three actions to create a single character, further slowing down your typing.
Some typewriters do have accents as characters you can overtype, but these are simple to add by comparison, they land in consistent places. Chinese characters are anything but consistent.
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#5TL;DR: The typewriter has 2,500 distinct characters, and in order to increase typing speed, characters that are related meaning-wise are placed together.
As an aside, typewriters are very interesting piece of tech, if you look under the hood. I have one that I use regularly, and it's quite pleasing to use (I've an Olympia Traveller de Luxe).
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#6The video doesn't play, here's one found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014 This one is a more advance "semi-automatic" version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM
I got tired of playing NoScript roulette. I don't know what goes through the heads of web "designers" these days when they can't control the impulse to pull in scripts from a dozen or more sites.
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#7From the video, using a typewriter seems to be sufficiently quick to be more efficient than handwriting, and of course more reliable. I find it a bit of a pity that a more phonetic writing system did not end up taking off. The most interesting bit to me is the shot of the code pages; these code pages remind the contemporary person of computer code pages.
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#8I suppose having only 2.5k characters available at a time on the tray means it would be used like a cache --- presumably the rarer ones would be kept somewhere else and swapped in as needed.
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#9The video doesn't play, here's one found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014 This one is a more advance "semi-automatic" version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM
I got tired of playing NoScript roulette. I don't know what goes through the heads of web "designers" these days when they can't control the impulse to pull in scripts from a dozen or more sites.
If there is subresource integrity, then is there a problem with that per se?
Re: The Chinese typewriter
#10I can understand why the government would heavily restrict printing presses, but why typewriters? They're only modestly more efficient than handwriting.