An English to Pitman Shorthand translator using the CMULexicon for pronunciation.

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing. Historically it has been used to take down speeches and public addresses verbatim during speech, and then is recorded in long hand later. This is the reason that we have so many verbatim records from ancient Rome, and other sources from before recording technology was available.

There are many forms of shorthand, each with their own quirks and benefits. Pitman Shorthand is one of these forms. It was developed in 1837 by a Sir Isaac Pitman. It combines thin and broad strokes to get more meaning out of minimal different forms. It is based purely on phonetics, so it is not language specific. However, this makes machine transcribing difficult since there needs to be a pronunciation guide for each locale, instead of just going through the characters.

This program takes a sentence(At the moment only in English) and displays the Pitman shorthand representation of that sentence.

Important notice: The .png images that are used for drawing shorthand are temporary and are for testing purposes only. They have been take from this very nice site that you can visit to learn about shorthand yourself! I highly recommend their resources, and have learned a lot from them.