Grascii

About the Project

Grascii is a language used to represent Gregg Shorthand forms using the ASCII character set (characters found on a standard keyboard). The Grascii Project, also referred to as Grascii, encompasses the set of tools and resources accompanying the language that facilitate the reading, writing, and study of Gregg Shorthand at all levels.

Useful Links

Made With

Python 3

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Python 3.7+

Installation

Install the package:

$ python -m pip install grascii[interactive]

Note: We recommend the interactive extra for the majority of users. You may omit the interactive extra when using the package as a library to reduce dependencies. Also see grascii-gui for a graphical interface for Grascii Search.

Verify the installation:

$ grascii --help

If the command fails, your PATH may not contain the location of Python scripts.

You can also try:

$ python -m grascii --help

Grascii Language

The Grascii Language aims to be straightforward for those who are familiar with Gregg Shorthand. That is, Grascii represents most strokes with the letters that match their sounds. For example, the word Cross is written as KROS.

For a more detailed overview of the language, see language.

Grascii Search

Grascii Search is the headline tool of the Grascii Project. It provides many useful options for searching Grascii Dictionaries (reverse Gregg Shorthand dictionaries).

Motivation

The existence of shorthand dictionaries have aided the conversion of longhand to shorthand. However, the reverse has remained a challenge since the inception of Gregg Shorthand. Grascii Search solves this problem by allowing users to identify the longhand corresponding to a shorthand form by performing a search based on its Grascii representation.

Basic Usage

Ex.:

$ grascii search -g AB
AB About
A|B Agreeable
Results: 2

Uncertainty

Occassionally, a stroke is mistaken for one of similar form. Thus, Grascii Search provides levels of uncertainty.

Ex.:

$ grascii search -g FND -u1
FND Found
FND Fund
FTH Forth
FTH Further
SND Sound
Results: 5

The ND stroke could also be an under TH or an MT/MD. The search accounts for these possibilities with Forth and Further. F is also close to S or V, resulting in Sound.

Interactive Mode

For repeated usage, we recommend running Grascii Search in interactive mode. For more complex queries, interactive mode removes the need of using escape sequences on the command line.

$ grascii search -i

Note: Requires the interactive extra

More Options

For more options, see search.

Grascii Dictionary

Grascii comes with a dictionary based on the 1916 Gregg Shorthand Dictionary.

More dictionaries for other versions of Gregg and dictionaries including phrases are available for installation at the Grascii Dictionaries repository.

You can also write, build, and install your own custom dictionaries.

For more information, see dictionary.

Grascii Dephrase (Experimental)

Grascii includes an experimental phrase parsing module.

It attempts to give the phrase for the most common phrase constructions in Gregg Shorthand and provide suggestions for never before seen phrases:

$ python -m grascii.dephrase AVNBA
I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE

Documentation

Documentation is available on Read the Docs.

Contributing

Contributions of any kind are welcome and appreciated. You can contribute by:

Reporting bugs or unexpected behavior
Fixing bugs and solving issues
Helping implement new features
Editing documentation for correctness, completeness, and clarity
Sharing thoughts and suggestions to improve the Grascii Language

Dictionary

If you find an error in any of the dictionaries, please open an issue or pull request at the dictionaries repository.

Contributions to the dictionaries repository are also welcome to correct errors and create more dictionaries.

License

This project is under the MIT License.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the developers of Lark, Questionary, appdirs and Qwertigraphy.

Maintainer’s Note

Grascii is not completely stable, but I hope others find the project useful. I try to open draft pull requests with task lists to keep the community informed of upcoming features and the direction of the project. If you notice that there has not been any activity for a couple of weeks, feel free to leave a comment requesting a status update.

– chanicpanic