Subject: Re: Processor-assisted keyboard

From: george chang <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 21:35:00 PST

According to an article in People's Daily, 30 to 40 hanzi can be handwritten
per minute at the fastest. typing must be faster. Furthermore, handwriting
is more easily tedious.

G. Chang
===========================================================================
From: Duh? <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: Processor-assisted keyboard...

I agree that pen-input does have quite some potential, regardless of the
language base. But there is one area that a pen can never outperform a key-
board: text entry. For English texts, one can easily outperform the swiftest
writer with a keyboard after minor amount of training. For Chinese text it may
not be so clear-cut for the time being and this is the whole point. With any
reasonably designed keyboard-based input scheme, a keyboard is still far
superior to hand-writing in text intensive tasks.

Regards

Bo

---

From: "HU Bo, IFT Munich, +49 89 54759129" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 May 93 11:29:33 CDT

>...
>typist uses a pen pointing at the desired radicals.  The typist
>I talked to liked it.  I wonder why it failed in the market place.
>I'm sure the price was a major factor.  But was there any major
>technical falt that prevent it from becoming popular?
>The only thing I can thing of is the speed and distracting --
>...

Many netters have posted their arguments for a pen input method of
Chinese characters (or Kanji for Japanese). I think that it is time
to point out the main (and, like a German would say: crushing) 
disadvantages of such an input method.

1) From the theoretical point of view of physics...
.. Your arms are much more longer than your fingers. So you have to take
longer time time to move your arms than fingers. That was the main problem
for a mouse-oriented input method I have implemented experimentally three
years ago[1]. To stroke a key is **much faster** than to draw a line. That
is the same reason why the one who types using two fingers is much slower 
than who uses his all ten fingers.
2) From a theoretical point of view of computer science (data technique)...
.. To enhighten the speed, a broad bus (8 bits? 16 bits? 64 bits?) should
be used. We happen to have got ten fingers but only two arms. Three-key
combinations are often used [especially for system programmers
and the people who have many undocumented programms], how would you 
implement a three-arm combination? [san1 zhi1 shou3 !?])
3) From the cultural aspect...
.. We have many Chinese characters with many strokes, in Taiwan [I will
try to not be political] even more. For example you want to input a
character which means "trout", zun(1) in pinyin. (You have 5 characters
in GB-Chinese with the same pinyin, in BIG5 maybe a couple more.) Ok,
you have to input the first 8 or 11 strokes which means "fish" and there 
are still 63 (!) characters in GB-Chinese fitting these strokes (assuming
there is no character which happens to have the same stroke sequence but
is not fish-redicaled). So you have to input 12-15 strokes to get the
right one. It is likely that it is easy for children to learn to input
their first (very easy) characters with pen-pad. But my three year old
son is even able to start Windows tipping and saying "w,i,n,big-key" and 
then start paintbrush to paint using mouse...
4) From computer scientific aspect...
.. One could say, ok, we implement the radicals as a bottom on our
pen-pad. So you have about 200 bottoms, or 100 bottoms with shift. So
you have exactly the M-101 or M-102 keyboard which we have but only
one finger (your expensive pen) to tipp on. If you want
to reorganize some of the radicals into to some groups, you have again
to learn Cangjie (or Cangjei) or Wubi or whatelse and learn to guess or 
think like the designer of the concept. [An Apple's slogan: "You don't need
to think like me, because I am thinking like you"]
5) From economic aspect... 
.. there are about 100,000,000 keyboards or much more installed. there is
no doubt that a keyboard will always be about 5-10 times cheaper than a
pen pad.

Any more questions?

Bo

[1] I have implemented the method of Li Jinkai, or the eight-stroke method
    for mouse.