8 9 10 by one elementary step based on the subsequent actuation of one of the direction keys 12 to 15 without any change in the shape of the character other instruction keys for manipulation of the characters such as for example the input of an instruction to rotate the character by 90 u00b0 etc may also be provided according to another embodiment it is also conceivable for the characters instead of being displayed on a display device 7 to be printed on a record carrier 29 after each changing step by the printer 30 of the ideographic typewriter the machine operator can follow the stepwise changes of the characters until they have their final shape it would then be possible to change each individually called up character which is to be used in the final character to be changed in its own line while a superposition instruction would superpose the respective last characters of two lines instead of the above mentioned screen printer 30 as well as screen display 7 the device according to the present invention can also be used for vector printers and in other than screen display devices 7 it merely being necessary to divide the actuatability of display device 7 and printer 30 into elementary steps so that the.