About Wangxuan

Wangxuan, the most famous computer scientist in China, was an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering and Third World Academy of Sciences. He died on 13th, February, 2006, when he was 70 years old. Though he was dead, the treasure he created will do good to all Chinese people as well as everyone in the world.
Wangxuan was famous for his Laser Zhaopai for Chinese characters, invented in 1985, which has greatly improved publishing technology in China.
As we know, the first computer was ‘born’ in USA and the development of computer science was led by Americans, so English is its mother language. So it is much more easy to deal with English for computer than other languages, especially Chinese. And it is convenient and efficient to work with the help of computers and since the invention of computer it has played an important role in people’s life. It can be said that the development of any country can not do without application of computers.
But it had been very hard to store and process Chinese information in computer especially in computer-aided publishing system, before the invention of Laser Zhaopai for Chinese characters. It was very inefficient to publish in Chinese then. Many foreign companies developed their own Chinese laser typesetting and desired to sell them to China in very high price. Though they were extremely expensive, they were not efficient enough. So it was necessary to develop our own Laser typesetting technology. Wangxuan set out to study laser typesetting for Chinese characters from 1975.
After overcoming millions of difficulties, the Laser Zhaopai was invented in 1985, and has been practically used since 1987. These days 99% of Chinese publications in China and 90% of oversea Chinese publications are typeset by the Laser Zhaopai system.
Not only is The Laser Zhaopai important to the computer aided publishing in China, but also it helped improve the storage and processing of Chinese characters in computers. Even the short message, which we may use everyday, can not do without Wangxuan’s technique of compression of Chinese characters.
Though Wangxuan has passed away, but the technology he created will continue to work for us. He will never be forgotten by us.