Welcome to plover2CAT’s documentation!

plover2CAT is a plugin for Plover, the open-source stenography engine. If the only user requirement is to write steno on the computer, this plugin is not needed as Plover is more than sufficient. plover2CAT supplements Plover by providing some features of a computer-aided-transcription (CAT) program.

Contents

New users are recommended to follow the Getting Started tutorials first, which cover installation of Plover, Plover2CAT, writing into the editor, adding formatting, and exporting the transcript.

Get Started

Start with #3 if you already have Plover installed and know how to install Plover2CAT from the command line.

  1. Install Plover

  2. Install Plover2CAT as a Plover plugin

  3. Create new transcript in Plover2CAT

  4. Write in the Plover2CAT editor

  5. Export to text and Open Document Format

How to guides for plover2CAT’s features (summarized below) can be accessed on the How To page. More in-depth overviews of the editor layout and menu items are located in References.

Features Overview

  • a rich text editor with steno hidden underneath:

    • paragraph “block” type formatting

    • undo/redo history

    • conventional editing features such as cut/copy/paste and clipboard

    • find and replace for simple text, steno stroke, and untrans

    • spellcheck using the spylls library with user-selectable dictionaries

    • autosave transcripts

    • image insertion

    • navigation of heading paragraphs

    • typing input when Plover is disabled

  • steno related features such as:

    • define/delete last untrans

    • define retroactive

    • insertion automatic paragraph affixes based on paragraph style

    • insertion of user defined fields

    • insertion of index entries

    • timestamped paper tape

    • creation and loading of transcript-specific dictionaries for each transcript

  • media (audio/video) synchonization and recording

  • captioning features such as:

    • separate window to display captions

    • customizable line lengths and word buffer between current text and text displayed

    • customizable minimum time interval between lines appearing

    • send captions to Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or OBS (both local and remote)

  • export transcript formats (with style templates):

    • plain text

    • HTML

    • ASCII

    • SubRip

    • RTF/CRE

    • OpenDocument Text

  • outline suggestions based on stroke history (powered by Tapey Tape or clippy_2)

  • transcript versioning using the dulwich library

  • custom shortcuts for menu items

  • translation of paper tape file into transcript

This plugin is built on Plover and inspired by plover_cat.

Getting help

Read the documentation

The how to ___ articles contain instructions on how to use different features of Plover2CAT.

The reference articles contain useful information on how Plover2CAT data is organized and saved.

Contact information

  1. Send a message over Discord. I am plants#4820

  2. Open an issue on the Github repository

  3. Email greenwyrt@gmail.com

Helpful things to do:

  • Go to Help –> About to view the version number.

  • Compress and attach the entire transcript directory, or the *.tape and *.transcript files.

  • If possible, add steps to reproduce the problem.

  • Add the log output from running Plover (debug) and attempt to cause the exact error.

Development and Contribute

Suggestions and bug reports are welcomed on the Github repository.

Descriptions of the editor and data formats are in the references and design/development sections. The actual code and API are not fully documented at this moment but still in planning. Both code and text overviews are in flux and subject to change at any time.

Acknowledgements

This plugin is under the MIT license.

Plover and PyQt are both under the GPL license.

Fugue icons are by Yusuke Kamiyamane, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Indices and tables