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This meant that Zhang would reorganize his characters every time a new political campaign started up. Most typesetters customized their character racks in one way or another, but Zhang had reorganized his into "natural-language clusters" – grouping Chinese characters that tended to appear together in sentences. The record-setting accomplishment, which Zhang later bettered to nearly 80 characters a minute, was due to his revolutionary character arrangement.
KEYBOARD PREDICTIVE TEXT MANUALS
The typesetter drew film crews, took part in parades, coauthored typesetting manuals and toured nationally.
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The feat made headlines in the People's Daily, the official party newspaper, and was quickly raised up as a model of communist innovation and efficiency. In this unique social climate, the announcement that one Zhang Jiying had managed to set more than 50 characters a minute garnered major media attention. Typists were responsible for reproducing the waves after waves of speeches, pamphlets and other political materials that accompanied massive communist efforts to reshape the country. "The burden for a lot of this fell on typists." "From the '50s onward, China was in a state of more or less perpetual political campaigns," said Mullaney. When it carried over to typewriters, Chinese typists were only able to manage 20 to 30 characters a minute, versus more than 60 words per minute for American secretaries.Īnd when the communists came to power, typists got busy. Within these sections, however, characters were arranged according to their dictionary order. More common characters were placed close to the typesetter, less common characters were far away and especially unusual characters were kept in separate cabinets.
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The moveable type racks used in printing presses were organized roughly according to how commonly the characters were used. Efficiency standardsįrom the start, there were predictive aspects to Chinese type. His research, excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History, appeared this week in the journal Technology and Culture.
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"Input issues that we're dealing with now are questions that China was thinking about in the mid-20th century," said Mullaney. And when they rearranged the tray bed to improve their typing speeds, these workers happened to anticipate many of the advances of modern text prediction software. The typist then presses a type bar, and the lever picks up the character, inks it, types it and returns it to its place.īut with upward of 2,500 characters crammed into the tray bed, simply locating the correct one could be a daunting task for early Chinese typists. Instead, the typist moves a character-selection lever over a tray bed filled with metal character slugs. Though viewed as little more than a joke in the West, the device is a remarkable engineering feat.Ĭhinese typewriters have no keys. Stanford history Associate Professor Thomas Mullaney is an expert – virtually the only expert – on the Chinese typewriter. From the T9 system on clamshell phones to autocomplete on smartphones, tough-to-type-on cell phones have been natural candidates for this kind of labor-saving input technology.īut in China, predictive text has been around far longer – since Mao Zedong was in power more than 50 years ago, in fact. The typist then presses a type bar, and the lever picks up the character, inks it, types it and returns it to its place.įor most Americans, predictive text is something cell phones do. To use a Chinese typewriter, the typist moves a character-selection lever over a tray bed filled with metal character slugs.