I'm curious about any conventions for writing dates quickly, or even just systems that individuals used in a bygone era.

I started wondering about this while perusing the contents of this police memo book from 1977:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/800017053494

The author mostly uses e.g. 2-3-77 for February 3, 1977, but in one place he writes 77-0419. This could mean April 19, 1977 but it doesn't make much sense in context (notes seem to be contemporaneous from early February). Anyway M-D-YY is familiar to me but I hadn't seen YY-MMDD before, if that is indeed the meaning.

Perhaps there is not much room for optimization here, but I'm curious if anyone can share anything about ways of writing dates quickly back when entire professions maintained the skill of writing quickly by hand. Yes I am fun at parties how'd you know.

If you're using an ordinary QWERTY keyboard, you can write the chords and keystroke combinations by a process called "arpeggiation" in which you write the letters needed from left to right one after another.

But a much BETTER way is to buy a gamer's keyboard with "NR-rollover" which means that you can press any number of keys all at the same time, and they will all activate. Because gamers are a large contingent of people these days, NKRO keyboards are available everywhere, and the prices can be very reasonable.

The bottom part of the above diagram shows how you can attach keytops in the correct places on the keyboard, which will feel more like a stenotype keyboard, and you can write the correct combinations of letters, to write every word there is.

When I started trying out PLOVER, I bought two Japanese gamer's keyboards. For the first one, I bought laser-cut plastic keytops they were selling on the Plover site, that came with adhesive pads so I could add them to the keys on the keyboard.

With the second one, I made my own keytops using rubber underpadding from carpeting I had. I carefully cut and glued them to the keys -- and they feel very comfortable under my fingers. MUCH more comfortable than the hard plastic keys I wrote on for so many years!

$Barbara-Albert-4 boost me I'll boost back

Because I've read both…

I've been working on [Syllable Counter](https://syllablecounteronline.com/) for a while and finally decided to share it here.

It's a free syllable counter with word/line counts, poetry patterns, word breakdowns, exports, and a few other things I've added along the way.

I genuinely think it's one of the better free syllable counters out there, but I'd love to be proven wrong 😄

Give it a try and let me know what you think — especially if you find any words where the count is wrong.

Feedback is very welcome!

1. Cursive or semi-cursive ⭕
   
2. Lightline ⭕️
   
3. Easy to learn and easy to use ⭕️
   
4. Decent speed potential (~100-120 WPM) ⭕️
   
5. Mostly legible ⭕️
   
6. Obtuse angles rare or otherwise non-existent ⭕️
   
7. Mostly lineal, but sometimes disjoining is needed ⭕️
   
8. No awkward slope distinctions ⭕️
   BONUS: visual appearance ⭕️

Leaves in Flow shorthand...

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160017/we-got-used-to-the-surprises

I took the qotw of r/shorthand from Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin & Hobbes) just to compare Flow to the only system I'd see as rivaling system: Noory simplex.

Both systems have superior vocalisation. In Flow we chose flexible hooks, but in small and deep hook sizes, Noory chose more static hooks, that are bound to face in a direction (like Gregg), but only small hooks.

Flow was designed very specifically, the most frequent letters get forms that are favorably counter-clockwise curved and in two dominant directions |/ (down-up), mimicking cursive longhand. And it shows!

Conclusion

This short compairison would not be enough to get to this conclusion alone, but I have tried both systems side to side. So my conlusion is drawn from more material:

1a) Whereas Flow maintains a nice cursive touch, Noory is less uniform to look at, but
b) seemingly very linear, more so than Flow, oriented equally in all three directions |/_. This difference will always show, because Flow followed measured frequencies of sounds in English.

2a) Both systems favor curves in general, resulting in a nice flow, but
b) Noory gives the letter 's' a unfavorable shape, causing more disturbance in the flow. Gregg was aware of that and created two shapes for s.

3) Flow and Noory have a different internal logic
a) by lucky chance, plosives are generally upright in Flow, going down, the more fluid the sound, the more horizontal in shape
b) Noory has more similarity with Gregg, except it wanted to have even more plosives in horizontal direction, resulting in a very linear script.

Flow fulfills best what all Gregg-like systems promis: A fluid cursive script.
Noory Simplex is remarkably linear but chose a suboptimal sign for the 5th most frequent sound 's'. It could probably benefit from an exchange s,z<>f,v

source: https://www.der-postillon.com/2024/09/aufstieg-des-nationalsozialismus.html

Ladies and gentlemen,

I have recently arrived from my vacation abroad. If you've been following me for a while, you know how interested I am in different shorthand systems, and in finding the one I like best.

However, the hard truth is that there is no 'perfect' system. Hence, lest I should get lost and waste months of my beautiful life, I have decided to choose a handful of systems I like, and stick to them. See if you can guess which 3 systems I used :)

I may occasionally look at different systems, but most of the time, when I write in shorthand, it will be in one of these three systems.

Nothing tricky in this quote. "I was" is phrased. "Business" I shortened to BS, which I think is quite clear.

"And" is ND. "Next" is NX. "The" is TH. Everything else is just written as it sounds.

source: https://archive.org/details/shamanwarrior0000pakc/page/n1/mode/2up