Exploring Professional Steno Machines

I wanted to point you to an article by new Plover user Thomas, where he explores various steno machines intended for professionals. It's the first in a series, and next he intends to do a survey of the amateur hardware sector, mostly made by members of the open steno community. Great stuff from a novel perspective, and I'm looking forward to reading more!

Some Cool Little Dictionaries

There's been a ton of stuff happening on the Plover Discord lately, involving MIDI-based English shorthand theories, ultralight key switches, wearable Ergodox harnesses -- almost too much to keep up with sometimes! But today I just wanted to highlight a few cool dictionaries, posted by their creators in the course of conversation over the past few days.

First up, Elzed's punctuation chart, a devilishly clever way to construct many common types of punctuation in a systematic way.

Then Jeremy's machine generated phrase dictionary, which is as exhaustive as it is impressive.

And finally, SyntaxBlitz's short but sweet dictionary of definitions with symmetrical strokes, extracted from the Plover default dictionary. Might be fun to use for finger drills sometime!

That's it for now. Stay tuned for an extremely exciting blog post coming soon from lead dev Ted!

Call for Contributors

Many of us are on the quite stable and feature-rich but officially pre-release Version 4 of Plover. In order to turn it into an official release, though, we need to resolve some issues (labeled with '4.0.0' on our Github repo), and our current devs are a bit overstretched at the moment. If you have some Python experience (it doesn't have to be a ton!) and feel like wading in to tackle one or two of those issues, they'd be extremely obliged! Being able to ship Version 4 as an official release would be amazing.