by fuzzythinker on 9/3/16, 10:58 PM
by gkya on 9/4/16, 3:50 AM
TL;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).
by userbinator on 9/4/16, 4:57 AM
I 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.
by zokier on 9/3/16, 11:12 PM
Not 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.
by jhanschoo on 9/4/16, 4:03 AM
From 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.
by wodenokoto on 9/4/16, 8:44 AM
I'm amazed that the layout is based on character common bigrams, rather than some logical systems. Imagine the hunting down a character you don't remember where is, or that you've forgotten was replaced with a different key.
Typist must have been extremely familiar with their own device and I would imagine they didn't like to share.
by titanomachy on 9/4/16, 6:57 AM
I can understand why the government would heavily restrict printing presses, but why typewriters? They're only modestly more efficient than handwriting.