That’s true, but it’s not really the limiting factor. If you have lead type, you can make yourself a set of Chinese characters almost as easily as you can make yourself a set of Latin characters. The limiting factor is the fact that porcelain type was a lot less durable in a press and needed more time and skilled labor to make, whereas lead type can be made en-masse by metalsmiths.
Composing Chinese with moveable type is still slower, because you need at least a thousand, maybe several thousand, different characters. Just physically selecting them is time-consuming. Back in the days of mechanical typewriters, attempts were made to design typewriters for Chinese and Japanese, but using them was no faster than writing by hand. A skilled typist on an alphabetic typewriter can go much faster.
Composing is slower, true, but composing a page for a printing press isn’t really comparable to typing on a typewriter. The cost of composition on a press is amortized across hundreds or thousands of pages printed, which isn’t the case for typing. In fact, we know that composition was worth the cost because the Chinese and the Japanese eventually did adopt the Gutenberg-style printing press in the mid-to-late 1800s as they industrialized and opened up to Western technologies.
That’s true, but it’s not really the limiting factor. If you have lead type, you can make yourself a set of Chinese characters almost as easily as you can make yourself a set of Latin characters. The limiting factor is the fact that porcelain type was a lot less durable in a press and needed more time and skilled labor to make, whereas lead type can be made en-masse by metalsmiths.
Composing Chinese with moveable type is still slower, because you need at least a thousand, maybe several thousand, different characters. Just physically selecting them is time-consuming. Back in the days of mechanical typewriters, attempts were made to design typewriters for Chinese and Japanese, but using them was no faster than writing by hand. A skilled typist on an alphabetic typewriter can go much faster.
Composing is slower, true, but composing a page for a printing press isn’t really comparable to typing on a typewriter. The cost of composition on a press is amortized across hundreds or thousands of pages printed, which isn’t the case for typing. In fact, we know that composition was worth the cost because the Chinese and the Japanese eventually did adopt the Gutenberg-style printing press in the mid-to-late 1800s as they industrialized and opened up to Western technologies.