SanHang is a vertical typography social networking service, displayed in Traditional Chinese and worked with a vertical layout producing vertical text from top to bottom, from right to left.

The basic interaction of SanHang is just like other social networking services, you can post, like and comment. If one types in Simplified Chinese, it will be automatically converted to the corresponding Traditional Chinese.

This idea came from when I was practicing calligraphy from copybooks, and reading ancient books. As ancient Chinese wrote vertically and wrote from top to bottom, from right to left, which is completely different from today's. This makes me unable to adjust and often can not complete my writing and reading.
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Therefore, I need a channel, such as an app or a platform, that can help me practice in my daily life. But I have researched from the internet and there is no such a product or channel like what I want.
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As a last resort, I made a decision to make one by myself. By doing this, I can also help people like me. So, what I need to do is to make it meet my personal needs. Because I think that only what I like and is really useful to me can be useful to people like me. I designed everything about this product and hired two techs, one for iOS development and one for backend, as I couldn't code yet at that time.
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Layout
Learn from Chinese ancient books, contain elements of a Chinese ink painting.

Fonts
Slender Gold (瘦金體), create by Emperor Huizong (宋徽宗) of the Song dynasty.
Wei Bei (魏碑體), create by Emperor Xiaowen (孝文帝) of Northern Wei.
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Basic
Post, like, comment.
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Addition
No deletion, can strikethrough text. Because in ink-written, typewritten, or other non-erasable text, it means the words are a mistake and not meant for inclusion.

Core
Vertical, lines start at the right side from top to bottom, from right to left.

So user needs to swipe right, not up. To read the content, user needs to read from top to bottom, right to left, column by column.

Component 1
Simplified Chinese is automatically converted to traditional Chinese.
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Component 2
Heavenly stems and earthly branches of Chinese calendar.

Learn from Chinese ancient books, contain elements of a Chinese ink painting.
On October 1, 2015, SanHang was officially launched on the app store. We've received more than expected positive ratings.

They said that they liked this Chinese-flavored product very much, and they were not willing to give a low score even if they encountered problems and gave feedback.
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After the product launch, I got two interviews. Although we have not done any promotion, the reporters still took the initiative to contact me.

They believe that such a product with traditional Chinese cultural characteristics deserve to be known by more people, because it can give more help to people who want to understand Chinese language and Chinese cultures.

I am greatly encouraged by the spontaneous recommendation of SanHang. This made me understand that as long as I do a good job of the product I like, I will definitely find someone who likes it too. Because the way to create new things is to understand how things work.

I was pleasantly surprised that so many people liked this product.
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They are overseas students who are keen on reading ancient books. They like this interactive mode, fondle admiringly, and even posted recommendations on Chinese social bbs.
They are journalists from the tech industry. They interviewed me and gave me a lot of advice.They are investors.
They wanted to invest in me but I turned them down because I couldn't promise the growth they wanted. If I had committed them, SanHang wouldn't be what it was.
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Did you know?  The group that contacted me the most were teachers. Some of them are Chinese teachers in colleges and universities, and some are teachers in social institutions. What they need is to use such a product to teach, and students can use such a product to complete assignments. It was a great pity because I was not equipped to handle such a requirement at the time.
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Nevertheless, it is important that I try. Still, it gives me a lot of confidence.

Now I have a lot of new ideas about SanHang:

SanHang should be a more powerful tool:

A tool with version control that can be used for writing in Traditional Chinese, can be used on laptops and mobile phones.

A collaborative tool, within an organization or with individuals, that enables access control.

With copyright protection mechanism.

SanHang should use state of the art technology: NLP/NLU model, translation between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, English and Traditional Chinese.

In 2015, I did not have the knowledge and background in the AI field, so we hardcoded the conversion between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, which created many problems:

1. Unable to solve the problem that one simplified character can be converted into multiple traditional characters. Because we hardcode characters, not phrases, and we do not have the ability to understand word meanings.

2. Even with hardcode phrases, the Chinese vocabulary is too large to traverse. We can not do that because the writing tool should not only provide common words, which are too limited.

3. Unable to keep pace with the development of technology.

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Vertical Traditional Chinese styling refactoring:

In 2015, there were not so many resources to refer to. Although we researched some Japanese, Mongolian, and Taiwanese products, we did not find a suitable solution. Because they are only through regular interactive input, and finally displayed in a vertical version, instead of interacting vertically at that time.

Our final approach is to limit the line width so that it can only accommodate one Chinese character width. So when user typing, it can automatically display from top to bottom. But now more and more people are trying this, so there are more ways for me to experiment.

Another question that bothers me is, how does SanHang make the authors or their writings gain more influence?

This should not be the size of a number, this should be the record of real existence, just like the words carved on the stone tablet, it will stand there forever for everyone to see. Undoubtedly, influential texts should not be forcibly deleted because of the government’s dissatisfaction. Even though they can destroy one side, they cannot destroy all sides.

So should SanHang be peer-to-peer?