Computational Linguistics: Graphical input/output of nonstandard characters
Communications of the ACM
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A major barrier to the human communication is attributed to the fact that there is no compatible typewriter, as in the Western World, for anynon-alphabetic language outside of the Western World. This paper will describe how a plotter can be used through programming, as a universal graphic character writer for all nonalphabetic as well as alphabetic languages in place of the typewriter. This is economically feasible since the plotter is not expensive and can be driven by a small computer on-line, or offline using a plotter and tape unit.Each character is treated as a single independent graph and decomposed into line segments within a 16 × 16 grid for non-alphabetic languages, and a 5 × 8 grid for alphabetic languages. Therefore, the graphic character can be represented by the coordinates which indicate the beginning and the ending points of the line segments.To take the most complicated Chinese language as an example, the character for "BRAVE" can be represented by twenty-three pairs of coordinates and packed into four 48-bit computer words. Taking this as a basis for estimation, the overwhelmingly numerous 10,000 Chinese characters can be decomposed and packed into 40K of memory. Thus, a computer with 65K memory will be able to keep them in core for direct access and processing.On the other hand, an English letter "M" can be represented by five pairs of coordinates and packed into one 48-bit computer word. In other words, the whole set of the English alphabet, including upper and lower cases, will need only II0 words of memory. The output on the plotter is itself a good hard copy to keep, and certainly it can be used as an original for further dupllcating, photographing and photoengraving.