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> I mean: think about a typewriter, hell, even typesetting. Do you know that a Hangul typewriter (for Korean) was a thing back in the 20th century?
by lifthrasiir 7y ago
> I mean: think about a typewriter, hell, even typesetting.
Do you know that a Hangul typewriter (for Korean) was a thing back in the 20th century?
- arpa 7y agoas was a Thai typewriter, Cyrillic typewriter, Arabic typewriter, hell, even Chinese and Japanese [0] typewriters [0] https://learning.knoji.com/short-history-of-the-japanese-typewriter/ https://learning.knoji.com/short-history-of-the-japanese-typ...
- lifthrasiir 7y agoI specifically mentioned Korean typewriters because they had an ingenious design to implement Hangul's combinatoric system---they put the final jamo back to the caret without advancing. It even works flawlessly in the modern computer typography, provided that you type a correct key for each jamo. To my knowledge widespread Arabic and Japanese typewriters were limited (Arabic generally had only initial and isolated forms [1], and Japanese was generally Katakana only---a full Kanji typewriter was more like a mini typesetter). Even back in the typewriter era, it was not simple. Everytime I see people screaming that Unicode and internationalization is overcomplicated, I like to challenge them with counterexamples. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-typewriters-work-for-Arabic-script https://www.quora.com/How-did-typewriters-work-for-Arabic-sc...