Characters and Computers

Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean are the three major languages used in East Asia. The speakers of these languages constitute one quarter of the world's population. These three languages, especially their written forms, are quite different from all others. CJK each have their special problems in information processing, but all three share the enormous difficulty of how to cope with large character sets. One of the key ideas presented in this book is that the most efficient, inexpensive, and user-friendly means for inputting characters under normal circumstances is through means of the phonetic alphabet.