Better RTF Handling

If you've ever been frustrated by the less than perfect way that Plover handles RTF/CRE files (the court reporting dictionary format that's never quite been implemented as smoothly as Plover's native JSON format, but which is pretty useful if you're using Plover alongside commercial steno software), try this new plugin from sammdot: Plover-Better-RTF, a Plover plugin for better RTF dictionary handling that's powered by rtfcre.

rtfcre is a Python library for reading and writing steno dictionaries in the RTF/CRE (Rich Text Format with Court Reporting Extensions) format. The library provides an API similar to that of the json module for reading and writing dictionaries.

rtfcre also comes with a little command-line utility that you can use to convert your dictionaries between Plover's native JSON format and RTF.

Features:

Speed: The parsing logic is written in Rust using parser combinators, making it much faster than practically any pure-Python implementation.

Comments: Rather than just exposing translations, rtfcre also reads the comments embedded in each entry ({\*\cxcomment like this}).

Unicode: Full Unicode support -- while the dictionary files are not encoded in UTF-8, Unicode characters in translations are still fully supported. Translations can be in any language and they will seamlessly be converted to escapes when writing.

Plover support: Translations are converted automatically to Plover's native syntax (e.g. fingerspelling is represented with {&a} rather than {\cxfing a}) and converted back when writing.