Stenograph vs Velotype (orthographic chord Keyboards)

[Mike S]

Is the stenograph not yesteryear's technology? It seems like that for the avg person who gets into Plover, that a Velotype keyboard makes far more sense. The learning curves seems to be shorter and it is possible to get up to 100 wpm 150 wpm a lot faster than it is with the stenograph. 

Why aren't more people creating velotype style keyboards? 

[Paul Beaudet]

Who is backing the open source version of the velotype?

[Mirabai Knight]

The Dutch version of the Velotype seems great. I'm still a little
unconvinced that the English version is able to efficiently handle all
the multivarious edge cases of English's extremely bizarre and
unpredictable orthography.

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Plover" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to ploversteno...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
Mirabai Knight, CCP, RDR
StenoKnight CART Services
917 576 4989
m...@stenoknight.com
http://stenoknight.com

[Jennifer Brien]

On Friday, 18 December 2015 14:26:43 UTC, Paul Beaudet wrote:

Who is backing the open source version of the velotype?

I didn't know there was one ;-)

The basic principles are fairly clear in the patent I cited:  http://www.google.com/patents/US4804279

but there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Consider the Dothan Syllabic Typewriter: http://www.google.com/patents/US3970185

Which is more directly related to the Stenotype.  This must have been fiendishly complex to make mechanically, but the 'programming' is mainly a couple of look-up tables. By my count this handles more combinations than Velotype, while being slightly less easy to learn.

Another table for the vowel keys, and you're done. All an orthographic keyboard has to to os provide for the chording of common letter sequences in a single stroke.  All you have to do is learn the chords for the missing letters and you know how to type anything.  There are also a few special chords for common syllables that don't fall easily into the key sequences, but you can learn those as you go along. No arrangement is perfect, but it doesn't take much to represent 90% of monosyllabic words and a fair few disyllabic ones in a single stroke.

For example, if you code the ten most common vowel pair onto the four steno vowel keys, that covers over about 90% of vowel pairs and only once in about every hundred words would you need to stroke (for example) suitable as su.it.able. 

Good enough?  If you were really, really fast you would have to do that two or three times a minute, which would be annoying. By then you would be thinking of either another key or two to handle more cases, or dictionary briefs for your most common exceptions. With an orthographic system the only complete words and phrases that need to be in the dictionary are the ones that you put there yourself. 

Because there is no system dictionary, and therefore no multistroke dictionary entries you need to indicate word boundaries manually, either as Dothan does, with a space key that can be stroked simultaneously with the letters; or as Velotype does, by assuming that every multi-letter chord is a monosyllabic word unless they are joined by a No Space key.  The latter cuts the usage of the most commonly-used key in half. 

For full keyboard emulation and more I think we one Meta key to provide layers. When it is pressed the lefthand (or righthand) keys are check and the result used as a index to swap in alternative lookup tables. These would either remain in force as long as the Meta key was held down, or the Meta key used on its own would restore the default tables.

So the decoding sequence is:

Check special keys and change table if needed

Concatenate the strings indexed by the main keys.

Is it a brief? If so, replace it.

Apply modifications suggested by the special keys (capitalisation, space, punctuation)

Output.

[Mike S]

I would also like a layer for the most common suffixes and prefixes.  I type around 20,000 words a day so I'm looking for a real world solution that doesn't require much memorization of rules. 

I would like a different layer selection key to give easy access to the most common pairings that go with both vowels and consonants.  

[Jennifer Brien]

Yes. You could have as many user-defined meta layers as you like - up to 200 or so! :) One hand selects the layer, the other the action, all in the one stroke.

But a meta stroke would have to be distinct from a normal typing stroke. I was thinking of putting the commonest suffixes (-ed, -er, -en, -ing, ly/e) on the right 'number row' keys so they could be folded into the stroke if there was a finger free. Likewise the commonest punctuation on the left side. That might be more useful than prefixes. Have a look at the Dothan patent and you'll see he uses that idea.

[Mike S]

Is this your design? I was going over some old booked marked pages I have and reading through some post on a blog lead me here: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/17ff31a8cf65c76d2224

[Jennifer Brien]

Yes, that's mine. Velotype tries to chord a letter with no more than two keys, and to avoid, especially on the three weaker fingers, having to press two keys with one finger. This was an experiment to see if with a few more keys I could simplify the rules. So:

All letters that can be typed are as shown on the key caps. The ones in the outer corners are produced by chording that key with Z on the same hand, the ones on the inner corner by chording with J.

Chorded letters are typed mostly in left to right column order, except for obvious exceptions. For example, Right right S comes before T, and NJT will produce ND, not GNT. Right J, if not used as a shift, will produce a trailing Y.
Where there are other righthand consonants, F and Z produce trailing E and S respectively.

Of the two red keys to the right of the vowels, one doubles the preceding vowels and the other inverts the order of the preceding vowel pair or, if there is only one vowel, it doubles the following consonant.

It works, mostly, but there are some awkward stretches.

[Mike S]

I'm playing around with a lot of different layout and I think that I've found one that makes a ton of sense to me. It have multiple vowel positions to allow the hands to flow across to the keyboard, also so that there are multiple ways to chord words based on hand size and the previous word. I'm finding that it is easy to remember the placement of words if I think about them based on the sound they make and how they pair with vowels. 

I'm going to order the top plate layout when I get back from vacation and see how this work in real time. I've only been playing with paper models so far. 

I have 16 empty keys, do you suggest I use them for common prefixes and suffices.

On thing that I will do once I make this is to have shorthand and briefs built into the firmware so that a ton of works can easily be chorded with one hand and with as few fingers as possible. 

[Jennifer Brien]

The most common suffixes are well worth having; the prefixes, I find, less so. Since a lot of really long words with multiple suffixes, I've been thinking of ways of managing them with a single stroke, but I haven't got there yet. Less of a payoff, but more common, is to fold punctuation into the stroke if you can.