Steno Summary

What is stenography

A stenography keyboard, or stenotype, consists of the keys STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ. This series is known as the steno order. Words are typed by striking keys simultaneously, with most words requiring only a single stroke.

The keys are laid out in the following order:

S T P H *   F P L T D    
S K W R *   R B G S Z    
    A O     E U      

Note that the leftmost S and * are double-height keys.

The words are spelt in the steno order given above (with some exceptions). For instance the stroke,

S T ▧ ▧     ▧ P ▧ ▧ ▧    
S ▧ ▧ R     ▧ ▧ ▧ S ▧   
    A ▧     ▧ ▧         

would give the word straps. Words are mostly spelt phonetically or may be given by briefs defined by either the user or imported from a pre-made dictionary of common briefs.

What we address

This key order does leave many letters missing, and these are stroked as a combination of two or more letters, for instance, F may be stroked as TP. However, these merged letters can make it challenging to interpret or remember strokes for a beginner. For instance, the stroke for "Family" is given as

▧ T P ▧     ▧ P L ▧ ▧ 
▧ ▧ ▧ ▧     ▧ ▧ ▧ ▧ ▧  
    A ▧     ▧ ▧        

which may be unclear at first. However, this is nothing more than the keys representing the letters "FAM". We provide a means to store not only the keys required for the but the sound groups making up the stroke that are much easier to remember.

More complex groups may also be represented, for instance, the sound Ment is given by PLT, leading to the particularly unclear stroke for "Department" TKPRAPLT, however steno-summary allows this to be stored as D + P + A + R + Ment.

     Department
      DPARMent        
▧ T P ▧     ▧ P L T ▧   
▧ K ▧ R     ▧ ▧ ▧ ▧ ▧   
    A ▧     ▧ ▧        

Commands

We provide a steno-manager script for adding or accessing the users dictionary. Currently, the dictionary is pre-filled by briefs that I have used while learning stenography. An example command is

 steno-manager starting-with [-s str]

to print all words beginning with a given string str. If this is not given on the command line, then an interactive mode is entered. The common commands are starting-with (starts), contains (cont), print-all (all) with shortened command included in brackets.

To add an entry Name consisting given by the KEY groups

steno-manager add [-n NAME] [-k KEYS] [-t TAGS [TAGS ...]]

or this may also be run interatively if no arguments are given.

Run steno-manager -h for more information on commands.

Letter sounds and disambiguation

We have tried to include all letter sounds used in stenography. These are included in letters.py. All consist of starting capital letter than may be followed by more lower case letters for complex groups such as Ment above or Ng.

We try to retain the steno order given above, however, this may not always be possible with the sound groups, and so a shift to the right-hand side of the keyboard may be given by a - in the middle of the group. Multiple strokes for the one word are separated by slashes.

See the documentation for more information.

See More

Plover is an awesome open-source interpreter for stenography and provides courses for learning stenography, visit learnplover or see stenoknight for more exercises.