Nice Write-Up on Stenonymous

A longtime friend and ally of the Open Steno Project, the dauntless professional court reporter behind the industry blog Stenonymous just gave us a really lovely shout-out. There's a lot going on over in the court reporting side of the biz that as a professional captioner I'm only vaguely clued into (especially since I gave up my subscription to my proprietary steno software a decade ago and have done all my work exclusively with Plover ever since), but it's really good to know that some court reporters want to join forces with Open Steno for the good of everyone, amateurs and professionals alike. It made me really happy to read!

A Week Left in the Uni Campaign

The Uni Kickstarter has raised almost $50,000, meeting its initial goal and unlocking two stretch goals (lighter springs and a DIY kit). If it can raise an additional $10,000 and change in the next 7 days, injection molded keytoppers will be unlocked as well. Exciting stuff! Can it happen? Let's find out!

New Chapter in Art of Chording!

Lead Dev Ted, author of the illustrious free steno textbook Art of Chording, writes:

Art of Chording, up until now, has been focused on what you can do with a single stroke, but now I'm going to tackle stringing strokes together and the challenges that come with it. The first lesson is an introduction to prefixes and suffixes.

Prefixes and suffixes are among the most powerful principles in steno, and I love the way Ted has explained them. If you want him to continue his fantastic work on Art of Chording, consider supporting him on Patreon. I do!

Practice Steno Using Z-Type

Z-type is a free webapp that lets you practice typing in the form of a fast paced arcade-style space shooter, not unlike Typestriker, the game that I played in the early days of steno school and which I found invaluable as a way to motivate myself to drill my weekly wordlists. Illustrious Lead Dev Ted recently recorded a brief video of himself playing Z-type with the steno keyboard visualizer turned on. It looks great! Might be a useful practice tool for beginner and intermediate users alike.

Pluvier: A French Dictionary Generator

Vermoot of the Plover Google Group and Discord has started a project to generate a LaSalle-compatible French dictionary for use with Plover.

From the description on the project's Github page:

This project aims at creating a dictionary for French steno, based on the TAO/LaSalle realtime theory, using a corpus downloaded from Lexique.org.

This corpus contains about 140,000 words, with a lot of metadata (phonetics, grammatical categories, gender and number, frequency, syllables, information about conjugation, etc) which will help in the creation of the steno dictionary, since some aspects of the theory rely/will have to rely on grammar and such.

Uni Kickstarter Stretch Goals

The Uni Kickstarter met its initial goal, but it's still active for another month, and it's only a few thousand dollars away from reaching its first stretch goal!



If the campaign reaches $30,000 in funding, lighter springs will be added to the store, which I find particularly exciting, since I enjoy using springs that are as light as possible. If it reaches $40,000, a DIY version will be released, which will be a boon to the mehanical keyboard assembly mavens among us. If you haven't pledged to the campaign yet, now is an excellent time!

Personal Dictionaries In Typey Type

Diana, creator of Typey Type, has just enabled a cool new experimental feature that allows users to get hints based on their own dictionary entries while using Typey Type.

She says:

It’s experimental but you can add your dictionaries and see your entries appear in Lookup! This lets you look up your briefs on your phone when you’re away from your computer, and shows your dictionary entries when building custom lessons.

You can also opt into the bleeding-edge experiment to “Show your dictionary entries in lesson hints”. This means for standard Typey Type lessons, you’ll see your own dictionary strokes if you have an entry for a word, and Typey Type’s entry if you do not.

Typey Type will also try to use your entries for capitalisation and spacing. For the existing entry, “KPAOEPB/KWRA”: “Xena”, you can use “xena” in your custom lesson and if you have custom entries for capitalisation, such as “TPHRO*ER”: “{>}”, Typey Type will use them to create hints like TPHRO*ER/KPAOEPB/KWRA. It’ll also try to be smart about punctuation, numbers, and fingerspelling entries.

This has been a long time in the making, a highly sought after feature, and I’ve had to overhaul huge parts of Typey Type to make it possible, so I’m very excited to start sharing this with more people!

There’s more work to be done but if you have feedback, I’d love to hear it!

What a fantastic feature! Superb work.