Honestly, I'm more interested in keyboards that use vowels or other combinations to write over something like this. It's interesting, but I never need to write anything anyway. But the ability to type much faster would be helpful in certain situations.
Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
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Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#42See also: Shavian alphabet https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/ Which has similar goals
Another one is Teeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#43Trading off writing speed for legibility seems wrong to me. Writing fast is a skill that can be learned by regular practice. If you spend half the time to learn an illegible code like orthic on simply practicing your usual handwriting you'll end up writing quite a bit faster while increasing legibility. I would try that first.
Orthic has a much greater economy of strokes, so it's as much about convenience as it is about speed. That is, you can write quite quickly without actually rushing.
It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines.
And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#44I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…
> Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.
Stenography is where it was at! My mom's second husband was working at the local parliament and had to take notes, in real time, about what politicians were saying and he'd use stenography. He'd then hand his "stenographed" notes to a secretary that'd convert them back to english, which he'd then proofread.
It was french btw, which is even longer than english (about 20% longer).
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#45Looking at images of shorthand makes me remember how much I just enjoyed playing the 2023 game Chants of Sennaar : https://www.rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar/ The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the…
I prefer Gregg shorthand to Pittman because Gregg doesn't require variable stroke width and thus it's easier to write with a ballpoint pen.
(Pitman doesn't require variable stroke width, but variable stroke darkness/pressure - important nitpick because you can vary pressure with a normal pencil, but need a fountain pen or uncommon carpenter's pencil for varying stroke width).
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it’s nice (nowadays, many keyboards actually support "swiping), it still gets so much wrong, and accuracy plummets for bilingual writing (For myself, I decided that the annoyance of getting nothing right because I’m in the wrong language is better than introducing more subtle errors). For those reasons, I still wish there were phones with full physical keyboards.
You might like Clicks in that case: https://www.clicks.tech/
Even if I were to ever use an iPhone (which I won’t), it bulks up phones even more. I already find modern phones far too large. I was thinking more of something like the Nokia E71 [0] or for a bigger screen, a slide out like the HTC Desire Z / T-Mobile G2 [1], both phones I had before, and loved at the time.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#47Is anyone aware of any good iPad apps for writing notes in shorthand, then converting to text? I currently use an app called Nebo to write notes and journal entries, then convert them to text before uploading into other systems. It works well, and I really appreciate being able to get away from a keyboard, but I'm a much slower writer than typist.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#48See also: Shavian alphabet https://www.shavian.info/alphabet/ Which has similar goals
I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might like Clicks in that case: https://www.clicks.tech/
Even if I were to ever use an iPhone (which I won’t), it bulks up phones even more. I already find modern phones far too large. I was thinking more of something like the Nokia E71 [0] or for a bigger screen, a slide out like the HTC Desire Z / T-Mobile G2 [1], both phones I had before, and loved at the time. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z
You might like the Unihertz Titan series. The Titan Pocket is very similar to the E71: https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan-pocket
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s legible to those who know it.
Right. And 90% of the writing I do today is writing out notes to myself while I plan or work through problems in my notebook. That kind of writing doesn’t need to be legible to anyone else.
Shorthand was never a commonly used technology by "normal" people and as I understand it even proficient users would not use it for their personal notes. It was used in situations where minimizing writing time was important, and then transcribed into standard writing shortly afterwards, while it was still fresh in their minds. It's not a replacement for writing, it's a replacement for a tape recorder.