From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: cassyjanek Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Keyscript Shorthand and other things Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:22:12 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <8364ce46-341c-459e-b4fe-c95d7e4d290a@f41g2000pra.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1237894370 14586 80.91.229.12 (24 Mar 2009 11:32:50 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:32:50 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Mar 24 12:34:07 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Lm4tS-0003QY-8e for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:34:06 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:55949 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Lm4s5-0003Mx-FX for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:32:41 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!f41g2000pra.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 44 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 220.235.244.218 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1237882932 6135 127.0.0.1 (24 Mar 2009 08:22:12 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:22:12 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: f41g2000pra.googlegroups.com; posting-host=220.235.244.218; posting-account=TfMTiQoAAADqz0q6zW_Yi7_F2VSOeCLd User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:167936 X-Mailman-Approved-At: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:30:09 -0400 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:63228 Archived-At: Hi. I haven't posted anything here before and I can't pretend I understand the technical stuff. It was in my mind at first to try to make Pitman Shorthand symbols to be able to be typed into a computer. Later, I wrote a course to teach Pitman Shorthand, based on Pitman New Course, which is Pitman New Era Shorthand. There were four types of exercises in this course. One type involved writing from longhand to shorthand. There was more to it than that, but I had been told by teachers in the past that it is better to write shorthand from dictation rather than from print. For some reason, my mind dwelt on this, and I decided to change the longhand into a phonetic script. (My tape recorder was not working too well, anyway.) This phonetic script ended up becoming Keyscript Shorthand. I never did change the exercises in the original course. Keyscript uses only the lower case letters of the alphabet, and saves on average 60% of the writing. In English longhand there are two words of one letter, 'I' and 'a'. In Keyscript there are hundreds. Does this mean that one letter in Keyscript can mean more than one thing? You bet it does. But, as Rustom has pointed out, you can pick the most frequently used word represented by that letter and assign it to that letter when writing in, for example, Microsoft Word, using the AutoCorrect facility. Where there is another common word spelled with the same letter, you can assign it to another letter. This brings me to the next point. If you computer engineers do come up with the shortest and most productive system of keying in type, will it be able to be used everywhere? For example, AutoCorrect can be used only on Microsoft Word (and probably on other Word programs in Mac, etc., I wouldn't know about that), but it cannot be used when writing emails and posts like this. So could you make this possible, seeing that this is how people write these days? Of course, this ability could possibly be built into the keyboard itself. My husband, Roger, was saying that there should be a key to type 'the' on a keyboard. This seems a very good idea. I have never used a Dvorak keyboard, but I can see that it would be more efficient and less tiring, with the most common letters in English being on the home row. My all-time favourite typewriter was an old Underwood, that I used at business college. It must have dated from around the beginning of the last century (but I did the course a little after that!). I liked it because the keys were thin, not solid blocks, and it seemed more responsive than the other typewriters.