Subject: RE: several issues

From: "J.B. WANG" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 May 90 13:51:00 EDT

Therefore, we will have ways to obtain this set of super quality font Chinese
. However, it should not concern us, because
1) It is too easy to change font sets as long as the internal encoding is in
  GB.
2) We are in USA, and we are interested in facing Chinese speaking, writing,
 and learning communities in Europe, North America, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong
 /Taiwan and other overseas areas.

The only thing we need to take care of this bitmap standardization is to avoid
hard coding of bitmap into the program.

As I pointed out, there are about 500 inputing Chinese inputing methods now,
and scholars have predicted that only one will survive according to the natural
law of competition. If one day, a Chinese dictator falls in love with an
inputing scheme, such as the component one mentioned in Wang Qiang's article,
it might become a standard in China before this dictator dies.

The best way to evaluate an inputting scheme is: it should be natural to the
language and logical thinking of a human being. Other things like blind-typing
or speed is of secondary importance. Component inputting scheme is nothing
new, as early as 1970, such a system had already been implemented in Taiwan
by the Computation Laboratory of the Institute of Mathematics, Academia
Sinica, together with the Electronic Data Processing Center of Taiwan
(see "PEACE - A Phonetic Encoding and Chinese Editing System", S.K. Chang).
The display device was a tektronix terminal. But when Prof. Chang saw
my ch-series which uses PinYin input, he was very impressed.
Among other criteria, a good inputing method should not require lots of
learning and memorization, and more importantly, it should not be
brain- and eye- intensive. If you want to type in an article which is
composed of sentences (of sounds) from your mind, you still need to loop in
your mind what a character is composed of (Fanti and Jianti may not be the
same, either), it is too bad, and you get fatigued very fast. Well, 90%
of accuracy in blind-typing (just according to the sound, and not the memory
of character structure or anything else) is no supprising in today's ByX,
TianMa and Chtext PinYin input.

Yes, folks, Fan2Ti3 will be supported by Ch-series, ByX and the binded
distribution. I have put a new "foreword.ps" in ~/tmp, 192.12.216.114
(anonymous login) for you to ftp and print. It is in FanTi. We are still
short of time in fix fonts, so bare with the quality for the timebeing.

Sincerely yours,

JB Wang