Talk:Chu Bong-Foo

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Chu was born in Huang Gang, Hubei to father Chu Huai-bing. His family led a wandering life due to the political turmoil in mainland China, but they finally settled down in Taiwan. There he studied at a local high school. He was an imaginative teenager who also spent much time reading novels, but so much so that it negatively impacted his studies. After graduating from Taiwan Provincial Agriculture Institute he, he taught briefly at an elementary school. Finding it not to his taste, he went to Brazil instead to develop his career, only to find life more difficult. Over that period of time, he took up several jobs. It was also during these turbulent times that Chu flirted with the Hippie lifestyle and studied at a local conservatory.

However, his work on Cangjie did not begin until he worked at a publishing house in Brazil. From then on, he would dedicate his life to revamp Chinese publishing. He saw for himself how the Brazilians could, in just one day, translate and publish foreign literature, while the Chinese took at least a year. The technology then, coupled with the complexities of the Chinese script, required a painstakingly process of creating the printing types. This meant that the dissemination of any information got to the Chinese earliest a year late. The Chinese script has no alphabets, so words could not be formed by stringing up letters. Neither is it possible to compose a Chinese character just by looking at its radicals. Chu began to tackle this problem by first analyzing Chinese characters from dictionary cut-outs, hoping to discover a way of unambiguously describing each character with as few letters as possible, and he continued this study even after his return to Taiwan.

Soon, he became involved with the use of computer technology. The ROC Defence Minister Chiang Wei-kuo invited him to return to Taiwan to develop a Chinese input method, which Chiang would later name "Cangjie". Chu put the input method on public domain in a grand effort to promote Chinese computing and essentially gave up his rights to any royalty. His sacrifice meant many future Chinese systems will come bundled with a free copy of the Cangjie input method, removing the greatest barrier to effective Chinese input systems.

Later, when the advent of the Chinese Microsoft Windows 3.0 endangered the Taiwanese computer industry and their efforts with Chinese systems, Chu's Shenzhen system for Chinese integration, in pinyin called Juzhen, (hanzi: 聚珍) stood up against this strong force. This engine was the product of his working in Shenzhen with a group of developers. It was released under public domain, and distributed through the Rexun magazine. Between the Chu and the financially strong Microsoft, the odds were against the former. However, Chu's engine had the benefit of space: For a font containing 13095 characters, Chu's engine took up at most a megabyte each and fit snugly on a floppy disk as compared to the 3-5 megabytes required by her competitors' products. This strong advantage of Chu's technology led a sizeable number of technology companies to initiate discussions with Chu for a transfer of technology rights. Soon after, Jinmei, Zangzhu and other budget font makers swamped the market, forcing prices down and ensuring that every user can afford original copies of Chinese typefaces.

After that, Chu left Taiwan for Macau. From 1999, he was appointed chairman of Culturecom Corporation, where develops portable Chinese textbooks.

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