Chapter 705 Word Library
“Among all of us, you are the only one who can do this,” Zhou Zhi said, “You know you can use computers to print books now, right?”
“Well, You know, the bureau now has computer typists. , I heard that the machine is very expensive, and the leaders don’t let ordinary people touch it.”
“Then do you know how many words the machine in our bureau can print now?”
“ Can’t all Chinese characters be typed? ”
"Of course not. What everyone uses now is a set of national standards issued by the China State Administration of Standards in 1980 and implemented in 1981. The standard number is GB2312-1980. The basic set includes a total of 6,763 Chinese characters. ."
"How many Chinese characters are there in our country?"
"Not counting the simplified Chinese characters, the Chinese characters included in the "Kangxi Dictionary" are 1. A total of forty-seven thousand and thirty-five."
"So much difference?" Feng Xueshan was shocked: "Not even a fraction."
"Yes." Said: "Of course, this is related to the current expensive storage units and the convenience of simplified characters. However, in the future, computer typesetting of books will be implemented. If computers are used to organize ancient books, the currently used font library will definitely not work."
"So..."
"So I have an idea to design a set of "Kangxi Font Library" for future computer typesetting of ancient books."
"No, no, I don't know it. So many words..." Feng Xueshan felt dizzy when she heard it.
“You don’t need to know them, just follow the descriptions.” Zhou Zhi smiled: “An important task in font design is the design of single characters, strokes, and radicals;”
“ The design artwork is then converted into a digital image through a scanning device and stored in the computer; then through digital fitting, the vector outline of the glyph is obtained. ”
"The next step is to expand the design and design other words in a spliced way."
"Finally, all the words obtained are encoded, converted into a file format in which a specific mathematical function describes the glyph outline, and then added with instructions , control the display effect and typesetting effect of its fonts to form a font library."
"The more I listen, the less I understand..."
"Listen. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand. I’ll find the words, strokes, and radicals, and then I’ll ask you to draw them on the grid paper I’ll provide you using imitation Song font, Song font, regular script, and bold font.” br>
“Given that we do not yet have the relevant computer equipment and font design software, we can only complete the subsequent extended design work manually.”
"That is to say, write out all the words one by one."
"That's all you have to do. I will complete the rest of the proofreading and testing."
" Finally, I will take all the manuscripts to Shudu and the capital, and use the most primitive scanning and matching method to generate the fonts we need."
"This is how we do it. The purpose is to design a large font library that can cover all known traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters, so that it can be solved once and for all. "And things will be simple in the future, we can do subtraction and do it." Some abridged versions are produced for people to choose freely to solve the problem of too large font library and insufficient computer storage resources.”
"Xueshan, tell me, expanding the computer font library from more than 6,000 words to more than 47,000 words, is this a major event related to our country's national economy and people's livelihood?"
"I'm fine just writing." After Feng Xueshan knew what she was going to do, she relaxed: "Even if it's 50,000 words, if I write a hundred words a day, I can finish it in less than two years. "
"Well, go to sleep now, and we will start this work when we get back."
This work was promised to Mr. Gu. At that time, Zhou Zhi once told Mr. Gu that if the country still did not launch a corresponding font library by the time he entered university, then he would complete the work.
Of course, in the absence of design software, the preliminary preparation work can only be done manually, which is bound to be cumbersome.
Just copying nearly 50,000 Chinese characters into a sixteen by sixteen 32-bit information grid would be very time-consuming and boring without software assistance. project.
This work is relatively simple and only basic.
After we have the benchmark font, we can use software and basic font design to automatically generate different fonts through digital fitting.
But as long as the basic work is done well, the rest can be completed through computer software.
Zhou Zhi has done some work in the early stage, mainly combining the simplified characters of GB2312-1980 and the traditional characters of Kangxi Dictionary to form all the Chinese characters required for this font.
As for the additional English letters and common characters, they are no longer part of his expertise. He can just let others add them in the future.
Combining the two and eliminating repetitions, the 50,000 words Feng Xueshan said is actually very close to the truth.
The reason why Zhou Zhi wants to intervene in this matter is because the current Chinese people have little experience in this matter, so they have fallen into a misunderstanding.
Chinese characters are hieroglyphs, and the difference from the Latin alphabet is that there are too many characters.
Today's mainstream approach is to simplify and only include commonly used characters in the input method to meet the needs of most times.
But Zhou Zhi believes that this approach is not very good, because what actually takes up storage space is the 50,000-character fonts, not the codes that represent them.
Therefore, it is possible to complete all fonts in Greater China in one step, including Hong Kong Island, Treasure Island, Singapore and Malaysia, island countries, North Korea and other places where Chinese characters are still used, as well as places where a large number of Chinese character symbols are used. Collect them all and compile a large character library first.
Specifically, the application at the upper level can be completed by extracting a subset from the benchmark font library.
At the beginning, only professional printing plants and publishing houses could use large font libraries. In the future, as the price of storage equipment plummets and equipment capacity expands exponentially, storage space is no longer limited to individual cards. After the bottleneck of computer prices, this font library will eventually be able to enter thousands of households.
This design idea jumps out from the traditional Western design ideas. It is no longer just a solution for headaches and pains, but a one-stop solution to avoid continuous upgrades, adjustments and versions in the future.
However, the funny thing is that the country did not complete this matter even before Zhou Zhi was reborn.
This is the difference in thinking between the pragmatism typical of engineering and the idealism typical of liberal arts. It is also caused by the lack of interdisciplinary participation and influence of liberal arts scholars when the Chinese people designed the font library.
I have to say that in the end this became a pity. Is it worth doing to incorporate all Chinese characters into a computer font?
The answer is obvious, but the Chinese people, who are eager to catch up with the great development of digital technology in world civilization, still proceed from reality in everything, and only think about two words in their minds - "can be used", and they don't care about it. Come up here.
Nowadays, there is even a prediction that in the future information world, there will be no Chinese characters; this beautiful language will eventually disappear in the information world; and the Chinese nation will also suffer from the use of such complex pictograms. In the great development of information technology, they have once again become a backward nation.
What Zhou Zhi wants to tell those people is that you are all fucking farting.
(End of this chapter)