Friday, October 15, 2010

Qwerty to Steno Key Map

File this one under painfully obvious. In all the excitement of the Plover release, I had forgotten that the actual description of the qwerty-to-steno layout that Plover uses was buried way back in the archives, and that new people trying to figure out how to position their fingers would most likely be totally lost. Sorry about that! By way of apology, I whipped up a new image that should be a little more helpful, and after I finish posting this I'm going to put it on the Plover FAQ Page as well.



The dark blue letters correspond to the letters of the qwerty keyboard. The light blue letters correspond to the letters on the steno keyboard that they produce when Plover is connected. Basically you move your hands half an inch up so that your left thumb is resting between the C and V keys and your right thumb is resting between the N and M keys. The rest should fall into place. a good test sentence to write when you first start up Plover (not least because even keyboards without n-key rollover often type it correctly) is:

AV A WR DVL RU

in qwerty, which corresponds to

SO S TH WOG HF

in steno, which translates to

So is this working?

in English. Now that you know where to put your fingers, try it out and let me know how it goes!

6 comments:

Norma said...

Wow, is your steno ever different than mine! What theory did you learn? HF is a question mark? Really? :D

Jenni said...

Hi Mirabai,

I think it's great what you're doing for steno with Plover!

I pointed a potential student over to your Steno 101 posts from depoman. Is there any way to link from the bottom of each post to the next so they could naturally flow from one Steno 101 lesson to the next? Kind of like with your What is Steno Good For posts.

Just an idea. Keep up the great work!

Unknown said...

my qwerty old keyboard and new sidewinder has bit different keys then the qwerty-to-steno-key-map image i have y at top row, and G in middle row

Q W E R T - Y U I O P
A S D F G - H J K L ;
Z X C V B - N M , . /

will it make any difference when i'll learn plover steno?
my understanding is that QWERT to Steno would be something like this when i put keypad on the keys

Q = NORHING
W = T
E = P
R = H
T = NOTHING

[ = D
P = T
O = L
I = P
U = F
Y = NORHING

A = S
S = K
D = W
F = R
G = NORHING

' = Z
; = S
L = G
K = B
J = R
H = NORHING

Z = NORHING
X = NORHING
C = A
V = O
B = NORHING

N = E
M = U
, = NORHING
. = NORHING
/ = NORHING

Correct me if i am wrong

the
AV A WR DVL RU
so is this working?

worked fine, but i guess i should memorize steno keys 'SO S TH WOG HF' otherwise it would be difficult to map AV with so, A with is, DVL with working.

I have no perior experence to steno or anything i am just start learning this because in our county there is no speech to text for people who are hard of hearing or Deafened and there is no demand (as people don't know about this possiblity), after learning it we will show it for awareness raising that what western world have, and we too can have, if we try.

Mirabai Knight said...

Hey, Danish! That was totally a mistake on my part. Thank you for catching it. Yes, the Y is definitely on the upper part and the G is on the lower part. They all serve as the asterisk or * key interchangeably, though. I've changed the picture to more accurately reflect what the qwerty keyboard looks like. Sorry about the confusion.

keypads said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Is there any plan to leverage the redundant mapping of both Q and A to the Steno left hand S key and the mapping of T, Y, G and H to the Steno * keys? The extra information that could be encoded in a stroke may be useful.

I use a Chinese steno keyboard (for English and Chinese shorthand) which has split keys where the Western steno has a single left-hand S key and the 2 keys which are the upper and lower * keys also have different values. I have set up my English dictionary to use those keys to encode additional information.