If you are tired of standard computer fonts and want your writing to underscore your personal style, a senior-high school has just the answer for you: Cheng Ken (程肯), a student at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, has developed software that can create “your own handwriting.”
Cheng, who won a gold medal and a cash award of NT$400,000 from Macronix International Co, said he began his research on “individualistic writing styles” while chatting online one day.
He observed that the most commonly used Chinese characters number about 3,500, but nobody has the patience to write all of them. So, he applied the concept used in Chinese philology to divide a Mandarin Chinese character into “small units.” That way, he reduced the character count to about 500 “units,” but still found them too numerous and needing further simplification.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
He determined ultimately that most people need to write just about 300 Chinese characters, which can then be modified to create 3,500 of the most commonly used words, covering about 95 percent of the vocabulary people use in daily life.
Cheng has written the program for computers and plans to extend it to mobile handsets in a push to achieve his goal of letting everyone use their own handwriting electronically.
Cheng’s programming has reached the stage of practical application, but he said he is not planning to apply for a patent, saying that it will be available as open source software so that others can also contribute to perfect the programming.
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