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Lapwing for Beginners

Welcome to Lapwing for beginners—the online book for hobbyists to teach themselves stenography with Lapwing theory!

To get started:

  • as a complete beginner: Chapter 1
  • as a current Plover user thinking about switching to Lapwing: Appendix A

NOTE: setting up Lapwing with the Plover app is covered in Chapter 5.

This resource is still in development and feedback is highly appreciated. You can reach out to me by:

Motivation

In early 2022, I was dissatisfied with the state of learning resources for Plover theory and started working on a new dictionary. However, throughout this process, I realized that Plover theory itself had many gaps and adding all the valid outlines would be impossible. I added more and more rules to account for these theory gaps, and slowly the entire project diverged far enough from Plover to be considered its own theory.

Over two years later, Lapwing is used by several community members and is a regarded as a viable theory to learn. I created this resource to make stenography more accessible to hobbyists.

Contributing

This book is compiled with mdbook. The source can be found on GitHub, and pull requests are welcome (build instructions are in the repository’s README).

If you like my work, maybe consider buying me a coffee 😄.

Thanks to:

Current tasks

This section covers a few shortcomings to this book I would like to address. If you want to see these realized faster, consider contributing!

Expanding chapter 25

The symbols and modifiers dictionaries that Lapwing uses are customized, and some official Lapwing documentation would be helpful.

  • All three dictionaries (emily’s symbols, modifiers, and Abby’s left hand modifiers) could use more explanation on how they work.
    • More like the official documentation on their GitHub repositories.
  • Abby’s left hand modifiers could use a graphic.

Expand appendix D

Some people prefer learning by using a reference guide instead of working their way through structured chapters. This is the motivation behind the appendix D. It also provides a convenient place to look up any forgotten rules.

The theory reference guide is currently work-in-progress, and very incomplete.