Steno Machine exercise font — Typophile archive

tfer28 September 2008 · 13:58

I'm thinking about designing a font with some special characteristic to use in some browser based exercises to be used to learn machine steno with. My plan is to start with a simple mono spaced, sans-serif font that closely matches the steno machines output, apply some transformations, e.g. slant initial side consonants to the right, final side consonant to the left - lines up with the angle of the hand producing them. That should be fairly straight forward, but the next bit is a little tricky.

In a line of steno, characters can only appear in one position, "STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ", the letters to the left of the 'A', are known as the 'initial consonants', those after the 'U' are the final consonants. There is a 'typewritten' short hand to represent a series of lines, (strokes, in the lingo), that goes as follows: '/' - for the start of a new stroke followed by any of the characters used in the stroke with these hints, to make the 'outline', unique; if no initial consonant is in the outline, a hyphen acts as a placeholder for their absence (unless a vowel is present, in which case it is not needed), if only initial consonants are present, then they are followed by a hyphen so you can tel that they are initial. Here is an example:
/THEUS /S- /A /DAUG /-FPLT -- for "This is a dog."

To have outlines appear as they would on a steno tape, I'm thinking that I could use the lowercase font positions for the initial consonants, (even though I'll have capitals in them), the capitals for the final side consonants but have the font specify a left-hand start (origin?) that corresponds to the left edge of the tape, and have "no width?" to the character so all the characters in a stroke overlap to create the look of the steno on the tape.

So taking the 'this' above, drop the carriage return for the '/', translate the character to "thEUS", and then have it show as :

T H EU S
_T___H____EU_______S - just to show the format in case spaces get eaten in this post.

I think this is possible, but I'm not sure, and even if it is I don't have the right terminology.

Thinking of inkscape to fontforge for tools.

Is this do-able the way I'm thinking or am I off base?

Any advice welcomed.

Tom Fetherston

Jason Pagura

It might not be too hard to build an animated interactive steno simulator in Flash. I don't think you'd even need a custom font for it--- you can skew the text either way as needed. I'd have to look up how exactly to do it, though.

tfer

Flash probably could do what I want, but a lot of this would be simpler if I used a custom font.

I simple terms I'm looking to have a font with characters that are twenty two normal characters wide, that all superimpose on each other, i.e. after a newline, all the characters display themselves from an origin that is the left edge of the text area with no "advance character width" before printing the next character.

I'd only need twenty two characters to cover the letters a steno machine can produce, which leaves lots of characters available for special effects, e.g. overlays that hint at the fingering needed.

I'm also thinking of using a half slivered mirror to superimpose this on the keyboard, so I could have a duplicate, but mirroring version.

Tom FEtherston