Tapey Tape

Tapey Tape is an alternative to Plover’s built-in paper tape. It provides a side-by-side view of strokes and translations as well as some extra information such as bars showing hesitation time and clippy-style suggestions showing opportunities to save strokes.

      |   KP   A              | {-|}
   ++ |      H AO E  R        | here
    + |        A  E        S  | *here's  >HAO*ERS
    + |     WH A              | what
      |  T                    | it
 ++++ |      HRAO      B G   Z| look {^s}
   ++ |      HRAO EU   B G    | like
    + |  T P H                | in
    + |    P  RA       B G S  | practice
    + |  T P          P L     | {.}

Viewing the paper tape

Tapey Tape does not have a graphical interface yet. Currently, it just writes the paper tape to a text file named tapey_tape.txt in Plover’s configuration directory:

• Windows: C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\plover\plover
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/plover
• Linux: ~/.config/plover

To view the paper tape, simply open the file with a text editor.

To get a realtime feed, you can use the tail -f command in a terminal if you’re on macOS or Linux:

• tail -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/plover/tapey_tape.txt (macOS)
• tail -f ~/.config/plover/tapey_tape.txt (Linux)

Alternatively, you can use less +F, which has more features. For example, you can press Ctrl+C to pause the realtime feed and use the arrow keys to scroll up and down, press / to search, etc. You can then press F to resume the realtime feed.

If you’re on Windows, you can use this PowerShell command:

Get-Content $env:LOCALAPPDATA\plover\plover\tapey_tape.txt -Wait

Suggestions

Tapey Tape shows a suggestion whenever you write something using more strokes than necessary:

|    P      E  R        | per
|  T P    O    R        | for
|    P H A      PB   S  | *performance  >PO*RPLS

When multiple translations are referred to, the number of translations is shown before >:

|    P H A  E  R    T   | matter
|             F         | of
|  T P   A       B GT   | fact  3>PHAERBGT

Suggestions will be shown if you use the attach operator {^} to suppress space when you could have used a prefix, suffix, or infix:

|  T P H  O E       T   | note
|  TK             L  S  | {^}
|    PW  AO      B G    | book  2>PWAO*BG

Suggestions will also be shown for stroke-inefficient capitalization:

|   KP   A              | {-|}
|        A   U  PB  T   | aunt  2>A*UPBT
|  TKPW RA  EU       S  | grace
|   KP   A            D | {*-|}  2>TKPWRA*EUS

Here “Aunt” is capitalized with the “capitalize next word” command {-|}, and “Grace” with the “capitalize last word” command {*-|}. In both cases you could have used the starred outline for the capitalized version of the word.

Contiguous fingerspelling strokes are treated as a group. For example, fingerspelling “kvetch” will only trigger suggestions for “kvetch”, not sub-words like “vet”, “vetch”, “et”, “etc”, and “etch”.

|      H    E           | he
|             F      S  | was  2>HEFS EFS
|   K      *            | {>}{&k}
| S     R  *            | {>}{&v}
|          *E           | {>}{&e}
|  T       *            | {>}{&t}
|   K   R  *            | {>}{&c}
|      H   *            | {>}{&h}  >KW*EFP
|                  G    | {^ing}
|    PW                 | about
|                   T   | the  2>PW-T
|    P  RAO EU       S  | price
|  T P          P L     | {.}

Installation

To install this plugin, right click the Plover icon, go to Tools → Plugins Manager, find plover-tapey-tape, and click “Install/Update”. When it finishes installing, restart Plover, go to Configure → Plugins, and check the box next to plover-tapey-tape to activate the plugin.

(If you don’t see the plugins manager, it may not be installed because you’re using an older version of Plover. Please see the Plugins page on the Plover Wiki for instructions.)

Configuration

You can customize the behaviour of this plugin by creating a JSON configuration file named tapey_tape.json in Plover’s configuration directory (see above). (If you don’t create the file or don’t specify certain options, the default values will be used.) The available options are:

• "output_file": an absolute filepath specifying the file to output to. ~ is expanded to the home directory. Defaults to tapey_tape.txt in Plover’s configuration directory.
• "bar_character": the character used to draw the hesitation bar. Defaults to "+".
• "bar_max_width": the maximum number of characters drawn. Defaults to 5.
• "bar_time_unit": the number of seconds each character represents. Defaults to 0.2.
• "bar_threshold": a constant number of seconds to subtract from the hesitation time of each stroke. (In other words, how long to wait before the clock starts ticking.) This can be used to hide the bars for fast strokes so that the bars for the slow strokes stand out more visually. Defaults to 0.
• "bar_alignment": either "left" or "right" indicating whether the bar should be left-aligned or right-aligned. Defaults to "right".
• "line_format": a string template specifying how each line in the output should be formatted. Special codes beginning with % are transformed into different items:

Code	Item	Example
%t	date and time	2020-02-02 12:34:56.789
%b	hesitation bar	+++++
%S	steno	...K.W.R....U.RPB...... (. = space)
%r	raw steno	KWRURPB
%D	definition	yes{,}your Honor
%T	translation	Yes, your Honor
%s	suggestions	2>KWRURPB
%%	an actual %	%

The default format is %b |%S| %D %s:

    %b |          %S           | %D      %s

  ++++ | ST        E   PB      | sten
    ++ | S K W R O             | *steno  >STOEUPB STO*EUPB

Here’s a comparison between %D and %T:

                          %D        %T

|    P H       R        | Mr.{-|}   Mr.
|    PW R O  U  PB      | brown     Brown
|      H  O EU    L   DZ| /         HOEULDZ
|          *            | *         *
|      H  O E     L   DZ| holds     holds
|        A  EU          | a         a
|    P     *    P       | {&P}      P
|      H   *            | {>}{&h}   h
|  TK      *    P       | {&D}      D
|  TK       E      G    | degree    degree
|  T P H                | in        in
|  T P H AO* U R        | {neuro^}  neuro
| S K   RAO EU  PB   S  | science   science
|  T P          P L     | {.}       .

In short, %D is the definition in your dictionary, including commands like {-|} and {.}. %T is the translation by Plover, or the actual characters that are output. (If a stroke is undefined, %D is displayed as /.)

You can additionally specify the minimum width of an item by inserting a number between the % and the letter code. For example, %10r makes the raw steno at least 10 characters wide by padding it with spaces. This can be used to generate a tabular output:

{
    "line_format": "%10r -> %T"
}

-T         -> The
KWEUBG     -> quick
PWROUPB    -> brown
TPOBGS     -> fox
SKWRUFRPZ  -> jumps
OEFR       -> over
-T         -> the
HRAEZ      -> lazy
TKOG       -> dog
TP-PL      -> .

Here’s an example configuration that stretches the hesitation bar to twice its default width:

{
    "bar_max_width": 10,
    "bar_time_unit": 0.1
}

Note that if you edit tapey_tape.json while Plover is running, you’ll have to restart Plover for the new settings to take effect.

Changelog

• v0.0.6: Improved suggestions.
• v0.0.5: Fixed an encoding issue.
• v0.0.4: Added the output_file and bar_threshold options.
• v0.0.3: Made the output formatting configurable.
• v0.0.2: Added different styles of displaying translations.
• v0.0.1: Initial version.

Related projects

• plover-tapey-tape.nvim: a Neovim plugin that features a toggle view of Tapey Tape, suggestion notifications, and status line integration.

Acknowledgements

The name of this plugin is a tribute to Typey Type, a free resource for learning steno.

This plugin is heavily inspired by plover-clippy.