Saturday, November 25, 2017

Call for More Free Multilingual Layouts and Dictionaries

So with the recent feature-loaded weekly release of Plover, we now have support for plugins, including the ability to add new steno keyboard layouts and protocols. This finally allows us to support non-English stenographic systems. Benoit implemented MIDI support, which opens the door for Italian steno using the Michela system. We've had other people stepping forward recently with dictionaries and layout plugins for Portuguese and Chinese. Now would be a great time for other multilingual stenographers to put their oar in. We've had a ton of interest in German steno, but apart from Stan Sakai's English layout German dictionary (which is mostly intended for captioning entry level German language classes), I don't believe any free German dictionaries have made their way to open steno. We've also had substantial interest in Korean, Norwegian, Russian, and Polish. I know many of these languages have machine steno theories that haven't yet been made computer-compatible, so they'd probably require a fair amount of work to get into working order, but consider this a challenge! I'm so glad and grateful that we can finally support an international steno community in the OSP, and can't wait to see what will happen next.

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