e-Tip #73 - January 2008 - Text-Only Version <> Wil Wilcox -- Eclipse Globaling Dialogue Shortcuts The Globaling dialogue is how you tell your CAT system what your steno means. Pretty basic stuff, but the Eclipse globaling dialogue offers lots of shortcuts that you may not have noticed. F2 inserts a speaker F3 inserts {Q} F4 inserts {A} Ctrl period inserts {.} Ctrl comma inserts {,} Ctrl ? Inserts {?} In other words, Ctrl plus punctuation mark saves you the trouble of typing the opening and closing brace for these kinds of entries. Alt A or Ctrl A = “All.” Only necessary if you want your global to apply in a backwards direction as well as a forward direction. Alt C or Ctrl K = Capitalize. A 3-way toggle: Smith, SMITH, smith Ctrl E for Special Entries. Help for special syntax. At the end of the list, help for creating Slop Stroke entries to improve conflict resolution. Ctrl G: Great for multi-strokers. If you highlighted 5 steno strokes and you need 7, just press Ctrl G two times. Arrow Keys: Up and Down to add/subtract strokes in front of your highlighted steno. Ctrl plus Arrow Keys: Ctrl Down and Ctrl Up to add/subtract strokes after your highlighted steno. Ctrl I = Internationalize. Type “chateau” and press Ctrl I. You get “château.” Ctrl J, Ctrl L, Ctrl M, Ctrl T, Ctrl B, Ctrl 1 through Ctrl 8 - Fast ways to say what kind of global (Job, Local, Main, etc.) Alt L = Lock with hard spaces or hyphens. A 3-way toggle: new{~}style, new-style, new style Ctrl N = surrounds text with braces. FLUSH becomes {FLUSH}. Can be handy, although not used that often. Alt R = Review. Quick way to query your dictionaries to find the source of a goofy translation and delete it so it won’t cause mischief in the future! Alt S = Check Spelling Ctrl S = Add Suffix or Prefix. New in Version 4.2. For example, if you’ve highlighted “specific,” you could pick “ly” from the list of suffixes and “specifically” would be typed in your text field. Alt U = Suggestions for additional entries. Integral prefixes and suffixes (e.g., you globaled ARPL=arm. Want TKSARPL, ARPLG, ARPLS, ARPLD…) Normalizing suggestions? (e.g., you globaled PUP AOE. Want PU PAOE or PUP PAOE?) Misstroke suggestions can cover the many ways you might mess up while trying to write TOPL TOPL to identify MR. THOMPSON. Ctrl W = Special Characters. Accents and other special characters that you can pick off a chart when you need them. As usual, there are Visualizers to show you these features in action. An easy way to find them is to simply open the globaling dialogue and press F1 to access the relevant Help page. <> Keith Vincent -- Bridge 2.0 Now Available Recently I wrote about the upcoming release of Bridge 2.0, a powerful but easy-to-use realtime viewing program that is FREE to all. You can now download Bridge 2.0 at www.eclipsecat.com. Make as many copies as you like for judges and clients. It's Advantage Software's gift, with no strings attached. I gave some preview copies to several of my realtime clients in depos that I took shortly before Thanksgiving, and they found it very easy to use. They loved the automatic split-screen display and found the icons and commands made a lot of sense. At the first break, I asked if there were any questions; and what I heard was that the built-in Visualizer movies had already gotten everyone up and running. You do not have to be an Eclipse user to use Bridge. The program supports the standard “CaseView” protocol. Just click on the "Settings" icon within Bridge and then select "CaseView" as the protocol. Unfortunately, the standard CaseView protocol does not support the Instant Auto-Refresh technology that has been a part of every version of Eclipse since 1997. For best results, it’s a good idea to use the latest version of Total Eclipse because it fully supports the Bridge auto-refresh protocol. The Bridge auto-refresh protocol is NOT proprietary. The interface info is freely and publicly available to all vendors from Advantage Software, and it’s my hope that other vendors of realtime reporting programs will adopt this protocol so that all our clients, no matter what viewing program they use or what CAT program the reporter uses, will be able to see our best work, not just a relatively rough draft. Video demonstrations of Bridge 2.0 can be seen at the “Bridge” page of my website, www.KVincent.com. That same page contains a link to download Bridge from the website of Advantage Software. Again, it’s free, powerful, and easy. Check it out! So why would you want to encourage your clients to use Bridge? For one thing, it's free -- no tokens, no proprietary protocols -- yet it's innovative and the 20 built-in Visualizers make learning fast and fun. Sometimes attorneys show up, wanting to connect to your realtime transcription, but they don’t have any realtime viewing software installed. You could give them Bridge 2.0. Just download the BridgeSetup program and copy it to a flash drive. Even if your client’s computer is “locked down” by IT folks, Bridge could run from a flash drive. So it would be a good idea to have a Bridge folder on a flash drive that you could just plug into a client’s computer on short notice. Make your client happy and, in the process, add some realtime income for yourself. <> Keith Vincent -- Auto-Mark: Setup and Search While writing, I mark two kinds of spots so that I can quickly find them later. The first kind of spots are where I want to check myself against the audio to make sure I didn’t miss something important. In other words, no one was coughing or mumbling or rustling papers, or drowned out by background noise. These are not spots where I must ask for something to be repeated. I may have lost concentration or mixed up a number. The steno that I use to indicate such spots is SKRUP (as in “screw-up”). SKRUP is defined in my dictionary as just one asterisk. During breaks, I can search for single asterisks and find the spots where I may have messed up. An occasional asterisk will show up on my realtime clients’ screens, too; but that’s not very distracting and it can be helpful. I invite my clients to work with me: “If you see a little asterisk on your screen, why don’t you just clarify that last bit? The asterisk is a sign that I’m not sure what I heard. Since you know the subject matter so much better than I do, you can probably help me out.” The second kind of spots are where I want to place an invisible mark that I can use to verify a name or a term. During a short break, I find those spots and ask about them. Getting that clarified while I’m on the scene can save me a lot of editing time. Witnesses and other speakers may or may not be able to provide me with the spellings I need, but they can at least let me know whether I’m looking for a “B” or a “V,” an “M” or an “N.” To mark the spots that I want clarified, I press the “Mark” button on my steno machine. Back in court reporting school, my teachers called that a “Hot Dot” because the old steno machines put a big purple dot on the steno tape at that spot. Today your steno machine may not use paper, but your electronic notes file will contain an Automark at the spots where you pressed the “Mark” button. Even if your input method is voice rather than steno, you can still set up a nonsense word like “blurp” so that it will serve as an Automark. So I hope the following tip will be generally quite helpful. In the “Input” section of User Settings, you can tell Eclipse what kind of Automark to expect. If you’re using a Smartwriter, Stentura, Flash, Cybra, Mira, or Stylus, your electronic notes file will contain at the spots where you pressed either the left or right “Mark” button on your steno machine. So at the “Input” section of User Settings, click on “Automark.” The steno emulator will open. Click on the “!” key in the lower-right corner of the emulator, and will register. On the StenoRAM machines, the left “Mark” button registers one combination of keys, but the right “Mark” button registers a different combination. Decide whether you want to use the left button or the right button to register an Automark. Push that button and see what keys register in your electronic steno notes. Then go to the “Input” section of User Settings, click on “Automark,” and select the keys that your StenoRam’s left or right mark key will register. If you have an older steno machine whose “Hot Dots” do NOT register electronically, you can just decide to write some one-stroker that won’t conflict with anything else. That stroke could be set up as your Automark. Again, set that up in the “Input” section of User Settings. If Speech is your input method, go to User Settings, Input, and click on “Automark.” When asked to “Enter Voisteno,” type in “blurp” or some other nonsense word that you intend to use. Once you’ve indicated how your Automark will register, here’s how to make it invisible in your translated text. In the “Input” section of User Settings, right below “Automark,” there’s a box next to the word “Display.” If you type in {NULL}, then your Automark will NOT display in your translated text, even though it will register in your steno or voisteno. In this case, {NULL} means “not displayed” in your translated text. How to search for these invisible marks? That’s the fun part. Your translated text won’t show your Automark spots, but they’re still searchable in your steno or voisteno. In fact, if you’re looking at your Notebar, you’ll notice that your Automark will appear as or “blurp” or whatever you indicated to support your input method. The default Hyperkeys contain quick ways to find these invisible spots in your job. Press Hyperkey v to open a list of forward scans, then press f (as in “flag”). Press Hyperkey r to open a list of reverse scans, then press f (as in “flag”). Once you’ve used Hyperkey vf or Hyperkey rf, you can press Ctrl L to Locate Next or Shift Ctrl L to Locate Previous. What are these Hyperkeys doing? They’re simply saving you the trouble of opening the “Find” dialogue and then using the “Find Steno” button to search for the spots where an Automark was registered. You do not have to use Hyperkeys to find the spots where your Automark was registered, but I think Hyperkeys offer a nice shortcut for what would otherwise take a few more steps. So if you’re not already taking advantage of Hyperkeys, I hope you’ll make it your New Year’s resolution to start using them.