Subject: Chtext's input method

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 90 15:22:47 EDT

Chtext is the line editor, interpreter and viewer in the J.B. Wang's
Ch-series.  It demonstrates many new concepts for Chinese input.
One of them is to combine PinYin and some strokes (represented)
by symbols like t, s...).  There seems to be 1-1 correspondence between
such combination and GB code.  It's certainly very attractive if
what you type on the keyboard correspond to only on Chinese word
(PinYin alone cannot do that).  In speeds up the input.  Most other
(simple) input methods cannot achieve this.  Here are my questions.

1) How natural is this method to a typist comparing to other methods?
What is the limitation of this method.
(Roman text typing is close to speacking, the speed of which is limited
by the speed of thinking, while writing relates to the visual nerval
system.  The speed of typing is faster than writing and can be close
to the speed of thinking.  But The incorporating of strokes in
J.B. Wang's method requires you to imagin how the character is written.
It can never match the speed of English typing.  But with the enbeded
problem of Chinese, there may not be a better way than this.)

2) Is the way it uses to represent strokes the best?  Is there
any possibility to standardize how we represent the radicals and strokes?

Yuan

---

From: [email-masked] (J.B. WANG)
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 90 17:06:56 EST

As Mr. Wang, Yongmin (5-stroke input method inventer) said in People's
Daily, there are currently 500 Chinese inputting schemes. Far sighter
all know that according to the law of natural competition, only one
of these 500 inputing schemes will survive. Althought 1/4 of world's
population is speaking and using Chinese, and the main part, i.e., the
mainland China is ruled by the communist party which has the absolute
power in setting up a standard (in contrast, USA and other democratic
states have to reply on defact standards, like ASCII). GB is the encoding
standard (not de facto in China). However, no one dared to set an inputing
standard. Therefore, significant effort is spent in China, Taiwan, especially
Singpore and overseas to find a inputing standard which will be the de facto
one.

As Yuan Jian pointed out, one of the Chtext inputing method is to append
abreviations of radicals to the end of a PinYin. This, however, was an old
idea I had in 1986 summer when I built the PinYin dictionary which is later
used in Chtext. The mapping is one-to-one, because Chtext is designed for
a mainframe dummy terminal, where graphics is not supported. In order to
edit an existing Chinese file (in GB), the way is ChText is to translate
GB into all PinYin (plus some escape commands). After editing, the file
is translated back to GB. If one 1-1 mapping, one has to do picking again
and again. This feature is only noticed by careful users like Yuan Jian,
because I did not document it. My believe is that it is a way for more
professional typist, if a table of such abbreviations is provided and ideally
standardized. For general users, I don't encourage using it. Nevertheless,
it is harmless even if you use it (probably inproperly) since auto-correction
function exists in ChText. For instance, to input Jian Yuan, the simplest
and best way is,

jian1-yuan2

or if you like,

j-y

where in the second instance, you have to browse through many characters in
the initial picking, but then it is saved in the Ci2Dian3. Therefore, 
afterward every time you type 

j-y

there is no more picking. Alternatively, you can also use single word input
mode, i.e.,

jian1ss yuan2ss

(I am sorry, it should be Yuan Jiang everywhere about, thus, it is

jiang1ss yuan2ss

)

where 'ss' means San1 Dian3 Shui3 (three dot water). There then is no picking.
Or since you know it is already unique, you can type

Jiang1ss Yuan2ss

or

jiang1ss= yuan2ss=

to tell chtext that you don't need to comfirm. Some then would say that
who knows 'ss' stands for 'three drops of water'. Prof. S.K. Chang, the
department chairman of Pitt CS department, showed me his paper that he'd do

jiang1sandianshui yuan2sandianshui

where, you can also try that out with Chtext, you will find that the
result is exactly the same as

jian1ss yuan2ss

except that Chtext worked a little harder to throw away the extra trailer.

In summary, PinYin plus CiZu and AI of context is definitely the way to
go. PinYin plus radicals is also a natural. Why, let's consider the situation
one telling the other over the telephone his name and address, in English,
he would pronounce and spell to avoid ambiguity, but in Chinese he would
pronounce each character and also provide things like radicals or common
context the word would appear. Therefore, to describe jiang1 yuan2 accurately,
over the phone, one would probably say,

jiang1, san dian shui yi ge gong
yuan2, san dian shui yuan-lai de yuan

What do you think folks?

J.B. Wang
------------