Wang Xuan

Wang Xuan the Chinese computer scientist (1937-2006) who led the development of the computerized Chinese character composition and laser typesetting system, an innovation that transformed printing in China and earned him the reputation as the father of Chinese laser typesetting.

Early Life and Education

Wang Xuan was born on 5 February 1937 in Shanghai, the son of a family that placed emphasis on education. He grew up during a period of war and social change and developed an early interest in mathematics and engineering. His childhood ambition was to become a mathematician, but the needs of the country directed him towards the practical sciences.

He entered Peking University in 1954 and studied mathematics in the department of mathematics and mechanics, graduating in 1958. He remained at the university as a teacher and researcher, working first on pure mathematics and later on the emerging field of computing, which was being built up in China during those years.

In the early 1960s he helped to develop one of China's first electronic computers and worked on software and logical design. This shift from abstract mathematics to the design of computing systems shaped his later career and gave him the practical understanding of hardware and software that would be essential to his greatest achievement.

The Chinese Character Problem

The Chinese writing system presented a formidable challenge to early computing. Unlike the Latin alphabet with its small number of letters, Chinese uses many thousands of characters, each with a complex internal structure, and representing and printing them required enormous amounts of information and computation.

The traditional Chinese printing industry used metal type, in which each character had to be cast and set by hand, an extremely labour-intensive process. As the volume of printed material grew, the industry struggled to keep pace, and the problem of mechanising and then computerising Chinese typesetting became an urgent national need.

Existing approaches stored character shapes as dot patterns, and the amount of storage required for a font of thousands of characters was prohibitive with the memory available at the time. Wang Xuan recognised that the problem demanded a new mathematical representation of the character shapes rather than simply more memory.

The Laser Typesetting System

Wang Xuan proposed to describe the outline of each character by mathematical curves and to generate the bitmap of any required size from that outline by computation. This approach, using rigorous parametric descriptions of the strokes, reduced the storage required by orders of magnitude and allowed characters to be rendered at high quality and at high speed.

He and his team developed a complete system combining the character description method, the rasterisation software and the laser imaging hardware. The first Chinese newspaper to be produced with the new system appeared in 1987, and the technology was soon adopted by major publications across the country, replacing the old metal-type methods.

The system was extended to handle not only the standard characters but also a wide range of fonts and styles, and to output at the high resolution required for professional printing. Derived products were sold both in China and abroad, and by the 1990s most Chinese newspapers and many publishers were using the technology that the team had created.

Research Leadership

Wang Xuan became a professor at Peking University and founded a research institute devoted to computer applications. He guided work on colour publication systems, on the digitisation of documents, and on the broader problems of information processing for Chinese, including the compression and transmission of characters and images.

He was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and he received many national awards for his contributions to science and technology. He was honoured as one of the outstanding scientists of the country and his institute became a leading centre for applied computing research.

He was also an eloquent advocate for innovation and for the importance of turning scientific results into useful products. He wrote and spoke on the relationship between research and industry, and he insisted that Chinese science should aim to solve its own distinctive problems rather than merely to follow work done elsewhere.

Influence and Legacy

The laser typesetting system is regarded as one of the most consequential technological achievements of modern China. It revolutionised the printing and publishing industry, ended the reliance on metal type, and made possible the profusion of newspapers, books and journals that characterised the country's later development.

Wang Xuan's method for describing and rendering Chinese characters influenced the design of fonts and of information systems throughout East Asia and beyond. His combination of mathematical insight with engineering application became a model for computer science in China, where he is remembered as a founder of the discipline's practical tradition.

He died on 13 February 2006 in Beijing at the age of sixty-nine. National recognition followed, including awards named in his honour and the naming of institutions after him. His life is often cited as an example of how fundamental mathematics can be turned to the service of a society's most pressing needs.

See also

• Laser typesetting
• Peking University
• Chinese information processing
• Chinese Academy of Sciences