in Taiwan, but was never widely used. Chinese input methods predate the computer. One of the early attempts was an electro-mechanical
Chinese typewriter Mingkwai () which was invented by
Lin Yutang, a prominent Chinese writer, in the 1940s. It assigned thirty base shapes or strokes to different keys and adopted a new way of categorizing Chinese characters. But the typewriter was not produced commercially and Lin soon found himself deeply in debt. Before the 1980s, Chinese publishers hired teams of workers and selected a few thousand type pieces from an enormous Chinese character set. Chinese government agencies entered characters using a long, complicated list of
Chinese telegraph codes, which assigned different numbers to each character. During the early computer era, Chinese characters were categorized by their radicals or Pinyin romanization, but results were less than satisfactory. In the 1970s to 1980s, large keyboards with thousands of keys were used to input Chinese. Each key was mapped to several Chinese characters. To type a character, one pressed the character key and then a selection key. There were also experimental "radical keyboards" with dozens to several hundreds keys. Chinese characters were decomposed into "radicals", each of which was represented by a key. for the Cangjie method, which is based on the
United States keyboard layout.
Chu Bong-Foo invented a common input method in 1976 with his
Cangjie input method, which assigns different "roots" to each key on a standard computer keyboard. With this method, for example, the character is assigned to the A key, and 月 is assigned to B. Typing them together will result in the character ("bright"). Despite its steeper learning curve, this method remains popular in Chinese communities that use
traditional Chinese characters, such as
Hong Kong and
Taiwan; the method allows very precise input, thus allowing users to type more efficiently and quickly, provided they are familiar with the fairly complicated rules of the method. It was the first method that allowed users to enter more than a hundred Chinese characters per minute. Its popularity is also helped by its omnipresence on traditional Chinese computer systems, since Chu gave up his patent in 1982, stating that it should be part of the cultural asset. Developers of Chinese systems can adopt it freely, and users do not have the hassle of it being absent on devices with Chinese support. Cangjie input programs supporting a large
CJK character set have been developed. All methods have their strengths and weaknesses. The
pinyin method can be learned rapidly but its maximum input rate is limited. The
Wubi method takes longer to learn, but expert typists can enter text much more rapidly with it than with phonetic methods. However, Wubi is proprietary, and a version of it has become freely available only after its inventor lost a patent lawsuit in 1997. Due to these complexities, there is no "standard" method. By 1989,
bopomofo and pinyin were available for the
IBM PC. In mainland China, pinyin methods such as
Sogou Pinyin and
Google Pinyin are the most popular. In
Taiwan, use of
Cangjie,
Dayi, Boshiamy, and bopomofo predominate; and in
Hong Kong and
Macau, the
Cangjie is most often taught in schools, while a few schools teach
CKC Chinese Input System. Other methods include
handwriting recognition,
OCR and
speech recognition. The computer itself must first be "trained" before the first or second of these methods are used; that is, the new user enters the system in a special "learning mode" so that the system can learn to identify their handwriting or speech patterns. The latter two methods are used less frequently than keyboard-based input methods and suffer from relatively high error rates, especially when used without proper "training", though higher error rates are an acceptable trade-off to many users. == Categories ==