Frequently Asked Questions
Table of Contents
- Plover
- Using Plover
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Comparisons to professional stenography
- Why does steno need amateurs?
- What is Steno Arcade?
- Is Plover going to put CAT software companies out of business?
- What are some features in Plover not commonly found in most CAT software?
- Can I use my Luminex/Stentura/Lightspeed/other stenotype machine?
- Can I use my dictionaries from another program?
Plover is a 100% free, open source steno program that lets you use your keyboard as a steno machine.
Falling numbers of graduates from steno schools and the high attrition of retiring stenographers initially caused Mirabai Knight to worry about the future of her profession, as inferior non-verbatim systems (e.g., ER, Typewell, C-Print, automated speech recognition) threaten to fill in the supply vacuum caused by a shortage of steno professionals.
At the same time, she saw steno's great potential in helping to improve the lives of the large number of people who work in front of computers all day, whether they're writing prose, creating software, entering data, or communicating in text with friends and coworkers. As a method of text entry, Qwerty is inefficient and unergonomic, but so far it hasn't been supplanted by any of the competing systems (such as Dvorak or Colemak), because they're simply not powerful enough to justify the time investment necessary to learn them. Steno, on the other hand, is.
So Plover has a double-pronged approach:
- Find people who want to learn steno, whether just as amateurs or as aspiring professionals, and give them a cheap, simple, and fun way to try it out.
- Then, for those few who find that they've got both a gift and a passion for steno, provide an opportunity to turn that skill into a career, feeding the talent pools for future professional stenographers and ensuring that steno as a profession will survive into the future.
In terms of speed, professional stenographers are expected to get to 225wpm at minimum, and the world record is 360wpm. Audiobooks are narrated at around 150wpm (source from an Audible/iTunes book provider). The world record typist, Barbara Blackburn, has achieved a peak speed of 212wpm on Dvorak.
In terms of comfort, many people say than stenography is more comfortable. Here is Mirabai's article on the ergonomic argument for stenography. There are fewer keys and therefore less finger movement. You write chords, not letters, so that reduces vertical movement. And you don't write out every single character — spaces are automatically inserted, and you can write whole words and phrases with a single stroke.
Mirabai Knight has done a presentation on this topic. As a summary, automatic voice recognition is still not accurate enough in certain situations such as if there is bad audio, someone speaking with a non-standard accent, or if the cost of certain mistakes is too high.
Some people are experimenting with voice typing technology, where someone who knows the voice recognition software well speaks into a special mic.
It's basically Mirabai Knight's personal dictionary, which is a mix of New York Career Institute theory and Sten Ed, with several thousand tweaks, briefs, and additions of her own.
Check out these links to the community.
The Beginner's Guide has everything you need to get started, including how to install Plover, what hardware you need, and how to practice and learn.
No! You can just get started and try Plover out on the keyboard you are using right now.
However, some keyboards will be easier to use for stenography than others. In particular, it's much easier on an NKRO keyboards or keyboards without stagger.
Find more information in this section of the beginner's guide, or in the keyboards section of the hardware page.
Yes! Plover can send nearly every keyboard key or combination you like. See the dictionary format for more information.
The only limitation is that it cannot hold down keys (for example, if you want to shift+drag). There is currently a pull request for this, so hopefully it will be possible soon.
Since there are many symbols and modifiers and not all of these are defined in the default Plover dictionaries, you may be interested in some dictionaries and plugins other people have made:
- Emily Symbols, for typing symbols (including those not in the main Plover dictionary)
- Emily Modifiers, for typing with modifiers (e.g. ALT+D, CTRL+-, SUPER, SHIFT+F5)
- Plover Emoji, for typing emoji
Yes, and many people do!
For example:
- The author of Art of Chording (a Plover theory textbook) is a programmer and there is a video of him walking through how he uses steno for programming fizzbuzz
- Mirabai Knight, who started Plover, has a demo of her transcribing some of Plover's python source code
To make programming easier with steno:
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For writing words/symbols used in programming, you can define a dictionary for them. You may want to use a dictionary someone else has already made:
- stenodict for the command line and vim.
- Di's steno dictionaries has many related programming dictionaries. Including, but not limited to, code.json, git.json, ruby.json etc.
- Emily Symbols for writing symbols.
- Emily's dictionaries which includes dictionaries for nix and c++
- Antistic's dictionaries which includes programming related terms, javascript and python.
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For learning these dictionaries, Typey Type includes community lessons which cover some of the above dictionaries (mostly Di's, as she wrote Typey Type).
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For writing in snake/camel/pascal/etc. case: You can set typing modes, control capitalisation, or type symbols like
_. There's also plover_retro_everything which lets you do this retroactively. -
Since it's harder to use both the mouse and steno at the same time, you may also want to learn how to use more keyboard shortcuts. Check out the question "Can I use Plover for normal computer use?" above.
Plover supports custom systems, so it's possible to use different language systems in Plover. Here's a list of current chorded systems that have been made.
You can see the 2021 community survey results to see how long people have been learning stenography, and what their speed is. It is reasonable to get to around your qwerty speed in about 6 months, though of course it depends on your qwerty speed and how you practice.
Aerick made a youtube video showing his progress over 5 months, where he was able to get to 100-160wpm, depending on the text.
People in professional stenography schools often expect to take about 2 years to get to 225wpm with 98% accuracy. However, stenography school is not a necessarily a one-to-one comparison to your personal use case, since it is designed as a track to being a professional court reporter/live captioner/CART provider etc. This may involve learning specific legal terminology, medical terminology, CAT software training, how courts work etc.
You can find a list of commonly used terms in the glossary.
In most skill-based fields — music, photography, athletics, and computer programming, to name a few — a healthy pool of amateurs makes it possible for professionals to exist. People cultivate an interest, buy some cheap equipment, take a few classes, discover that they love the work, hone their skills with thousands of hours of practice, and eventually a very dedicated and talented few are able to become good enough to make a living at what they love. The rest do it without compensation, just for their own pleasure and enjoyment. This is the natural ecosystem of any difficult skill: A wide base of dabblers and dilettantes at the bottom, and a small number of world class hotshots at the top.
Without a steady supply of amateurs to hold the ranks, it's difficult for professionals to exist. Many legendary musicians started out with a $50 guitar and a tattered songbook. If every guitar cost $5,000 and the only way to learn how to play it was at a conservatory, how many potentially great guitarists would never even get within strumming range? Plover reduces the $1,500+ initial startup cost of steno to around $70, which means vastly more people can give it a try and see if it might be for them.
Steno Arcade is a suite of arcade games designed to teach and drill steno fundamentals in an immersive, addictive, responsive, and interactive way.
Very unlikely. There will always be a place for high-speed dictation and one-on-one interaction between steno professionals and students. Steno Arcade will be directed at people who want to use steno non-professionally, aren't sure whether steno is for them, or who want to try it out a bit before committing to making it a definite career goal.
There will always be some autodidacts who can get through the Steno Arcade program entirely by themselves and find themselves certification-ready at the end of it, but that will probably be fairly rare.
Definitely not. Plover is not court reporting software. It has no transcript preparation utilities of any kind. However, it might prove useful to people who use other CAT systems for their work but would like to use Plover as a replacement for their qwerty keyboard in daily computing tasks. At some point Plover might become a solid option for CART providers, but there are no plans to make it into CAT replacement software for either court reporters or broadcast captioners.
- Plover's main purpose is to replace the qwerty keyboard with a steno keyboard. Unlike other CAT systems, it does not have a text entry window; it's a pure conduit straight to the operating system. Anything you can do with a qwerty keyboard can be done with Plover, and you can use it with the word processor or text editor of your choice.
- Plover runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Its length-based buffer, as opposed to the time-based buffer used in most CAT software, ensures instant delivery of text with no buffer flushing or time delay.
- Its dictionary is text-based, so you can search through and edit it using any text editor. Updating the dictionary from the writer is smooth and seamless.
- And, of course, its biggest feature: It's 100% free and open source. You can download it, keep it on a USB key, and have it to hand as a backup in case something happens to your CAT software. You can distribute it to interested friends and potential steno students. You can run it on as many computers as you like, with absolutely no restrictions. And, if you know how to program in Python, you can modify it and change it to your heart's delight.
Plover Dictionary Update Demo (click to view video):
Yes! See the stenotype machine section in supported hardware for machines that have been confirmed to work with Plover, and any specific setup instructions you may need to follow.
Yes, Plover supports the RTF/CRE format, which is exportable from just about any CAT software.