China, the land where movable type was invented some 400 years before Gutenberg, again is moving forward in the world of printing One of the longest strides in the last millennium was taken September 16, 1965, when the United Daily News, Taiwan's largest privately owned newspaper, began to use fully automatic typesetting machines. At long last, Chinese ingenuity had overcome the printing handicap of too many characters to be represented on a single keyboard.
Movable type was invented by Pi Sheng in 1038 A.D. during the Sung dynasty. In 1314 in the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, Wang Chwg-fu printed books from engraved wooden blocks. The art of printing from movable type reached the West in the following century. Along with such other Chinese inventions as the compass, gunpowder, and paper, it came back to China in improved form several centuries later.
The Chinese quickly learned to use the compass as an instrument for surveying and navigation, to use gunpowder in weapons, and to employ paper for money, communications, and a variety of other things. In printing, however, progress was much slower. Until now the Chinese have been barred from mechanized typesetting by the sheer number of the ideographs.
Lead type was introduced to China in 1807 by Robert Morrison, a British missionary, to print the Christian Bible in Chinese. Because the Ching (Manchu) court frowned on Christianity, Morrison secretly employed Chinese workers to engrave type molds in Canton and Macao. His attempt became known to court officials. To save their lives, the engravers destroyed the molds.
Seven years later, Morrison sent two assistants, W. Milan and Tsai Kao, to Malacca to set up a Chinese printing house. The first Chinese edition of the New and Old Testaments, totaling 2 million copies, came off the press in 1819.
Similar attempts were made by another British missionary, J. Marshman, at Penang, in 1815 and subsequently by several American and French missionaries in Hongkong, Macao, and Ningpo. Results were not satisfactory.
The sizes of present Chinese types were established by W. Gamble, plant manager of the Mei Hua (American-Chinese) Printing Office of the American Presbyterian Church at Ningpo. Imitating Japanese and English types, Gamble made seven point-sizes of molds to cast Chinese characters.
In 1860, Gamble made a study of Chinese characters and classified them into three categories according to the frequency of their appearance in the Bible. The most frequently used character-types were put into eight boxes in the middle of the type case. Those for ordinary use were divided into 16 boxes, 8 each above and under the more frequently used boxes. Rarely used types were contained in 24 boxes each on the two sides. This was the beginning of the classified type case system in China.
In recent years, several Chinese and Westerners have attempted to print Chinese characters with various automatic typesetting machines, including photo typesetters. However, the working speed was too slow for use by newspapers.
Success at Last
UDN has four perforators; each operator works four times faster than a manual typesetter (File photo)
The typesetting machines of the United Daily News consist of two parts: a perforator and a caster. Occupying a floor space of 1,000 X 740 mm, the perforator has 1,188 keys, 27 on vertical lines and 44 on horizontal liner. Each key contains two characters for a total of 2,376. This is almost the same as the number of types used by the Chinese typewriter. The 960 most frequently used characters are placed in the middle of the keyboard.
A tape with a dotted line down the center is mounted on the right side of the perforator. When the operator punches a key, the tape is perforated on both sides of the center line. Each perforation represents a character. Possible combinations are adequate to take care of thousands of characters.
The maximum mechanical speed of a perforator is 312 characters per minute. Depending on his memory and skill, an operator can punch 40 to 85 characters per minute. The average speed is between 60 and 70 characters. This is about four times faster than hand setting, which ranges from 15 to 20 characters per minute.
If operators of an English-language typesetting machine and a Chinese-language perforator were working side by side, an observer might be misled into thinking that the English operator was working faster. In fact, however, they would finish copy of the same length about the same time. Comparison of the phonetic alphabet and the ideographic characters shows the reason why. For each English letter, the operator must strike a key. Each Chinese character consists of from one to more than 30 radical strokes. But regardless of the number of strokes, each character is a single unit and the key need only be struck once.
Letter vs. Character
To typeset such English worlds as "otolaryngology", "extraterritoriality," and "internationalization", the operator must strike 14, 19, and 20 keys, respectively. The Chinese equivalents are (erh-pi-hou-k'o, literally, ear-nose-throat-section), (chih-wai-fa-chuan, literally, rule-extra-legal-right): and (kuo-chi-hua, literally, nation-transform). They will require 4, 4, and 3 key depressions, respectively. Of course, the typesetting machine has only 52 letter keys—counting lower case and capital letters—compared with the more than 2,000 for the Chinese machine. Thus the Chinese operator has fewer keys to punch for each word but will take longer to find them. In the end it comes out about even.
Electronic brain reads perforated tape and helps automatic caster make 112 to 120 Chinese characters a minute (File photo)
The floor space for an automatic caster is 1,250 X 1,025 mm. As the punched tape fed into the machine, it casts 112 to 120 characters per minute. An electronic brain reads the perforations and casts the corresponding characters in lines of nine characters. These are arranged vertically—because Chinese newspaper columns are made up and printed that way. The reading is from the top down and from right to left. Spacing between characters is automatic. When deeper vertical columns are required, the line length can be extended to a maximum of 65 characters.
Conventionally, a Chinese printing house has a foundry to cast the huge number of types needed for hand setting. With the introduction of the typesetting machine, these huge stocks can be dispensed with. Hand types are used only for headlines, advertisements, and those not included in the perforator.
Many Variants
In normal operation, one caster can serve two perforators. But the ratio may vary with the needs of the printing establishment. The United Daily News has six perforators and four casters. Cost of one perforator and one caster is about US$20,000.
Early speciman of Chinese movable-type printing (File photo)
Development of the machines was spurred by Wang Tih-wu, the publisher of UDN, after a visit to Japan six years ago. He studied automatic typesetting machines used by the Japanese printing industry, and was convinced that if printing difficulties could be overcome for the Japanese language, the same was possible for Chinese.
Japanese newspapers succeeded with mechanized typesetting earlier because the number of Chinese characters in common use in the Japanese language was limited to 1,850 after World War II. Including Katakana and hiragana syllabaries, English alphabet, Arabic numerals, and other signs, a typesetting machine required only 2,300 characters.
In China, phonetic signs are used only in juvenile literature. All other publications are printed in ideographic characters that total some 45,000. Of this number, however, about three-fourths are either variants or rarely use. For example, the noun "smoke" is written either 烟 or 煙. "Fight" has three forms: 鬥, 鬪 and 鬬. "Oar" has four variants: 櫓, 樐, 木虜 and 艣. The characters listed first are most commonly used, however. A dictionary for high school students contains about 9,000 characters. This is still far too many for a mechanized typesetter.
To cut down, the UDN studied the Chinese characters used in news reports, literary works, and advertisements. Vocabularies were compiled by experts in various fields. Special vocabularies may range from 1,000 to more than 5,000 characters. The San Min Chu I (Three Principles of the People) by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Founding Father of the Chinese Republic, contains 2,134 characters. In most literary works, the figure is in excess of 4,000.
The United Daily News finally selected 2,376 characters, including 20 punctuation marks, and sent them to the Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho (Machinery Works) Ltd. of Japan for design of the perforator and caster. Patent rights were granted to the UDN for its vocabulary.
In research carried out since 1963, the Ministry of Education has selected a vocabulary of 3,860 characters for primary school pupils. Some linguists and educators who took part in research now agree that the news paper's vocabulary is sufficient for daily use. The MOE vocabulary covers almost every character used in textbooks. Characters with two pronunciations are counted twice.
Other Chinese newspapers preparing to install similar equipment and periodicals also are bound to be affected. In the end, this will mean a highly literate, better informed people. China thus has come full cycle in printing. It was for just such a goal that printing from movable type was invented in the first place.