CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Keyboard Arrays

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Two Latin keyboard arrays—• M-style and High-speed Roman

ree mobile keyboard arrays—one for Japanese, and two for Korean•

e market for dedicated Japanese word processors experienced enormous ux in key-

board designs and usage. It seemed that for every new computer model that a hardware

manufacturer introduced to the market, the same manufacturer introduced two or three

dedicated Japanese word processor models. ese word processors are much like comput-

ers, but the basic soware for word processing is usually xed and thus not upgradable.

Genuine computer OSes are designed for more general usage, so there is far less variety

in keyboard arrays. In fact, some dedicated Japanese word processor keyboards may have

more than one keyboard array imprinted on their keys. is is done by imprinting more

than one character on each key. I once owned and used two dedicated Japanese word pro-

cessors, specically NEC’s  5G and 7H.

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On the tops of their keys were imprints

for the QWERTY and JIS keyboard arrays, and on the sides of the keys were imprints for

the 50 Sounds keyboard array.

e intent of this chapter is not to teach you how to use these keyboard arrays eectively,

but rather to tell you a little bit about them and their characteristics. I should also point

out that this book does not denitively cover all keyboard arrays. It cannot. Doing so is

well beyond ...