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Jiexi Caihong
(Unweaving the Rainbow )
Kexue xuwang he xuanmiao de youhuo
(Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder)

That's interesting. But I see Chinese characters on the front cover instead of what was typed in your letter. Is there a computer program that takes a combination of my letters I type on this english key board and then translates it into one of 3,000 possible chinese characters? Is that how it works?

Computers must have been a boom to the chinese newspaper industry if this is the case. Otherwise, one would have to have a keyboard like an ancient black and white picture I saw as a child for a chinese newspaper that is something like 50 to 60 keys long and the same for width for the commonly used 3,000 characters!

Meme Wars
Monty Vonn
montyquest@aol.com

If you want to input some Chinese characters, you should use Chinese IME (Input Method Editors). Just type English letters, the IME will convert them into Chinese characters.

One of the most used IME is PinYin (Chinese phonetic symbol) IME, because every literate Chinese understand it. PinYin uses all 26 letters. Although PinYin is so easy to use, there're some defects. One PinYin syllable may refer to one to several hundreds of Chinese characters. So, after typing, you should choose out the character you really want.

It sounds so unefficiency, but luckily we have some technologies to improve it. One tech is word/sentence-based PinYin IME -- even a Chinese can't tell meaning of a single PinYin syllable , but it's easy to read out a string of them, a sentence. With the help of these AI tech, PinYin IME now is much more efficient.

Computers boosted Chinese newspaper industry. Before computers are widely used, we really have Chinese typewriter --looks like the large version of English typewriter, with an array of fonts (some 3000 characters) at the bottom of typewriter. It's a slow machine, even the typist is skilled.

Edited by: conanlee at: 7/12/03 5:52 am