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.

Getting Started

Next Steps

The user should know what stenography is at this point, and can set up a machine / keyboard for writing through Plover before exploring and using the features of plover2CAT.

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.

Contents

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

  • audiovisual 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

Two ways: 1) Send a message over Discord. I am plants#4820 or 2) Open an issue on the Github repository.

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