Vietnamese Steno!

Plover Discord member huynhtrankhanh has made a steno theory for Vietnamese! Also an innovative steno system that runs on two phones! Very cool stuff!!

Quick Stats

Yesterday I did an interview with a journalist about the Open Steno Project. It was really fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results in a few weeks! But one thing the journalist asked me was about the approximate size of the Open Steno community, and I thought that might be of interest to y'all, so I figured I'd post it.

Total downloads of Plover: 147,957

Now, of course this counts multiple releases potentially downloaded more than once by the same people, but still! That's a pretty respectable count, in my opinion! And of course that doesn't count people who are primarily using steno via Javelin, which would boost our numbers event more.

Plover Discord: 7,981 members

I'm really proud of this number too. Lots of really excellent people on there. One of them asked me to tell y'all about the Quote of the Day in the #raw-steno-only channel, where a different quote is posted every day and then everyone gets to show off their own idiosyncratic way of writing it. If you haven't yet joined the Plover Discord, you really should. It's the beating heart of the Open Steno community.

PyCon Plover Meetup?

I'm gonna be captioning PyCon with White Coat Captioning in Pittsburgh next month, from May 15th to 18th. Anyone in the Open Steno community who's planning to attend, I'd love to meet up, talk steno, try out each other's machines (I'll probably bring about five of 'em!), and maybe plan for the future of the Open Steno Project! Please feel free to email me at plover@ploversteno.org or get in touch with me (@stenoknight) on Discord. A multiperson steno hangout would be wonderful, if we can make one happen!

Feather, a One-Handed Steno Theory

The ingenuity of the Open Steno community never fails to amaze me. Check out Feather, an attempt currently in progress to make a workable one-handed steno theory! How cool!!

Jarne Firmware Update

Tharelia says:

Further update for Jarne users: April 6 evening build will now automatically migrate your user dictionary from on-chip flash to external flash, and update to the latest dictionary storage version at the same time.

This has several advantages:

* The external flash is rated for 100k writes, instead of 10k writes.

* The external flash is much larger. The user dictionary on the Jarne has expanded to 1MB instead of 256kb (compare with 512kb on pico boards)

You can see it's worked as you'll be on version 3 and have larger hash and data block usages available after.

Froj!

StenoHarri made Froj, a shorthand dictionary generator:

Froj converts Edinburgh's pronunciation dictionary into stenography outlines using theory rules and brute force.

Every rule depends on four things:

Spelling

Phonetics

previous keys

Prefixes/roots/compounds/suffixes

Every rule outputs three things:

chord

ambiguity (for conflict resolution)

description (for FrojBot)

Typey-Type Updates!

Di has done it again!

Better suffix hints: Typey Type's now a bit smarter at suggesting longer suffix translations over shorter ones. For example, to write "suitors", Typey Type will now suggest `SAOUT/O*RS` instead of `SAOU/TOR/-S` because the `^ors` suffix is longer than the `^s` suffix. Typey Type now also ranks affixes a bit like how it tries to show better stroke hints and hide misstrokes. This means that even when using personal dictionaries, Typey Type should give you better stroke hints when there's no exact dictionary entry for a word and it suggests using affixes to write it out.

Better fingerspelling behaviour: I updated lessons and the Typey Type dictionaries to help fix a rare issue that sometimes causes issues with stray spaces while fingerspelling. Props to JRJurman, Monniasza, Paul Fioravanti and others that have helped with various parts of that.

Added links to steno demos: I added links on Typey Type to interactive steno demos so it's easier for people to try steno straight away in the browser without setting anything up. Props to Waldir for sharing their experience about exploring steno.

Links and more details here.