Tuesday 10 May 2011

Chinese Typewriter

The Qwerty layout of keys has become the de facto standard for English-language typewriter keyboards. Usually there are 42 to 50 typing keys. But how about a Chinese typewriter? The Kangxi Dictionary contains over 40,000 characters. Surely, there can't be 40,000 characters on a keyboard.

So how do they do it? Here's a video of a Chinese typewriter produced by a company called Shuangge. It's capable of writing at least 2500 symbols.



YouTube link

More info on the Chinese typewriter.

(thanks Cora)

1 comment(s):

Brian K said...

Proving once again that pictographic languages are having trouble with technology. Imagine trying to remember WHERE all those various word are located on the bloody keyboard?