Introduction

I practice stenography casually as a hobby using Plover, a free-software stenotype engine. Keep in mind that I am very much a novice.

Why Use Plover?

1. For people who can't use their voice to speak but want to communicate in realtime
2. For people whose fluency of thought depends on ease and efficiency of text input
3. For people who want to avoid wasted effort and repetitive stress injuries
4. For people who want to input text and control their computers while walking around
5. For people who want to provide live verbatim transcription professionally
6. For people who have to be the fastest, no matter what

PHROFR

Punctuation

Punctuation strokes tend to have mnemonics based on the position of the keys and not the phonetic value of the stroke, however there are exceptions such as SKHRAM ('sclam) for !.

Managing Whitespace

A space is automatically inserted between forms. Definitions can suppress the space, though, such as is the case with prefix and suffix strokes.

Affixes

Prefixes

Suffixes

Movement Commands

Plover comes with a handful of definitions for simulating functions of a qwerty keyboard, such as arrow keys. Here are some of them:

Meta Commands

These are commands for controlling Plover itself, including my own definition for {PLOVER:LOOKUP}: