I’m+using+Dragon+NaturallySpeaking+(DNS)+with+scrivener
instead+of+spaces+it+is+typing+plus+signs
what+is+the+solution?
Here is a reply Katherine (user = kewms) gave when someone else asked about Dragon support in Scrivener:
The thread is Scrivener, Dragon Naturaly Speaking for Spanish, in Windows English OS - #3 by kewms
There is nothing Scrivener folks can do about it, so any help will have to come from other Dragon users.
For Speech to Text I used to use Nuance Dragon Pro.
It worked well, was quite fast and accurate but you needed to copy/paste into Scrivener because Dragon doesn’t support Scrivener.
The fact that Dragon doesn’t support Scrivener may account for the issue you are experiencing.
I’m using Dragon Home, Not getting pluses, but it’s not putting in spaces. In other words, if I am writing in Scrivener and I pause for a bit to think, Dragon doesn’t put in a space after the period for the previous sentence. But only in Scrivener, and only the last period. I stopped using the dictation box a week ago, because I found it uncomfortable to try to use for writing, but I’m starting to think I’m gonna need to turn that back on. That problem does not exist for the dictation box.
Does it do the +++ in the dictation box, QVC?
I use DragonPad and then paste-and-match-style into Scrivener. That seems to work fine and lets me do full corrections in DragonPad first.
I have been using Dragon for several years with Scrivener and I haven’t seen that problem. I have found that Dragon Pad is a better option than the Dictation box. There’s a great forum for Dragon users at KnowBrainer.com (knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/index.cfm). I’ve found them very helpful in all sorts of questions related to Dragon. I also use their KnowBrainer product and it significantly enhanced my ability to use Dragon with Scrivener. There’s a bit of a learning curve but I’ve found it very helpful. I typically dictate directly into Scrivener and it works quite well.
I’m new to the forum, and did search, but didn’t find anything.
RE BC’s comment to raise it with Dragon, it happens with MS Voice Recognition as well.
It also happens with both when words are spoken into the search box of most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, MS Edge), except IEv11 !!!
So I thought it had something to do with how ‘escape characters’ are dealt with, (Think SQL injection and stripping out characters that could be code.)
Scrivener may have some type of escape coding that causes spaces to be replaced by +
Or not have coding that should preserve spaces.
I am aware that some users use Scrivener without problems regardless of DNS version.
I am using Scrivener Windows v3. I used Windows v1 for a long time (that shows dedication!) I’ve just tried Dragon with that but it’s slow to print what I say and also has + signs.
I’m pretty sure it can be resolved within Scrivener. It would need a knowledgeable Scrivener coder to figure it out.
I am not looking to use DNS’s heap of commands, In my decade of using it I say: new line, new paragraph, spell that, undo that, bold that. I’m pretty undemanding of its features.
DNS’s Dragon Pad and Dictation box work fine, as does MS Word with DNS,
DNS is super accurate and fast with Word: I’ve trained it well. I can speak very fast, and it keeps up, and it understands my regional English accent.
I really, really want to just talk into Scrivener without having to use some proxy process in front of Scrivener. I hop about a lot, use two panes at once, and so an intermediate ‘word’ processor would be a burden,
Testing Dragon speech using the Dragon dictation box, creates this output when I press the transfer button using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pro and scrivener for windows version 3.
This paragraph was dictated into Scrivener version 3 for windows directly, using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, without any intermediate step. Whatever the issue that may be happening at your end, I cannot reproduce it here as you can see the spaces look like spaces.
I am going to copy and paste this document directly into the forum to demonstrate.
I use the dictation box with Scrivener with great success. It moves the dictation directly into scrivener. As far as the + instead of spaces my suggestions are: 1. Use the dictation box 2. Change one dragon setting at a time until you fix it. 3. Your license for dragon came with tech support use it if it’s still active. 4. Use a dummy scriv project as your testing ground,
First of all, let me thank you for being a good community. You have been a great help.
I tried out Teriodin’s solution in his first paragraph, which was to use the Dragon dictation box, and clicking Transfer. This works fine. However, the problem is that when the transfer is done the box closes, and to create another set of text you have to go into Tools and select Dictation Box again. (Is there some type of shortcut that can do this?)
He then dictated into Scrivener Version 3 for Windows using DNS and it worked fine for him: he didn’t get plusses between the words. In my original post, I noted that some users were able to use DNS in this way without any problems.
I am happy to say that I have now solved the problem of being able to use DNS directly with Scrivener Version 3 for Windows, with some limitations. It understands “New Line”, “New Paragraph”. It doesn’t understand most of the commands, such as “Correct That”, “Spell That” which I use quite a lot. However, Scrivener’s spelling checker does this very well.
For those of you interested in how I solved the problem the answer is below. It is quite long, so skip to the end if you don’t like interesting stories!
Explanation Starts
At grammar school we had to learn Latin. In order to learn French, you had to do Latin for two years. I served my time, but was then told that the French class was full and I had to do Geography.
In about 2016. I decided to attend French class at night school. My three main objectives were to be able to read French with perfect French accents (!), to be able to read French newspapers online, and to be able to write notes for myself such as shopping lists and reminders in French. No attention was paid to teaching the French accent and so I quit the class after 14 weeks. I had devoted 20-25 hours per week studying. I then did self study.
I discovered Anki, a desktop/tablet flashcard system. It is brilliant for learning a language. Having read a book called Fluent Forever, I was able to create flashcards. These were to include the French Swere to be on the flashcard. There were a number of problems. It is not easy to type French fluently on an English keyboard, or English on a French keyboard. Neither keyboard will type IPA.
After a lot of hassle, I decided to create my own keyboard layout, and had it manufactured in America. It was not expensive, even though I chose a mechanical keyboard. With the software driver loaded I can still use an ordinary UK keyboard, but I prefer my custom one.
Using the main three rows of keys, I could type English, French and IPA. Using only the four fingers of each hand in their base positions on the middle row I could type 63.5% of English characters, and 64.7% of French characters. It was trivial to capital letters in both French and English. 66% of French letters are on the home row. On the main three rows 99.87% of French characters can be typed without any special finger gyrations, including French capitals with accents, and all the types of punctuation.
Looking at the design I realised there was still room for me to include other languages. I put in the Romance languages: French, Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese (but not Romanian). As a result, I called the keyboard “The Romance Keyboard”. Looking still further I found I could include German Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, and Latin. Then, I added the Celtic versions of Irish, Welsh and Scottish. I could also type French and Portuguese dialects such as Catalan, Galician, and others that I can’t remember. A small number of characters require the numeric row to be used (these are mainly dieresis characters, but they can also be typed on the main keyboard by typing the accent first them the letter). Typing accents on the main keyboard is trivially easy. à á ñ ´ç é è ù ú ø þ ð å ê ¨ “” „ ‹› «» — – ö ü ä À É Í Ó Ù Ç Ê È ¿ ? etc
All the different speech quotation marks, and punctuation, from the various languages are available on the main three rows. The bottom row has what I call the “social networking characters” which produce the characters @ # - !
The keyboard is ergonomically optimised for English and French. The QWERTY keyboard takes 40% more effort to type the same text. I used various algorithms from the Internet to work out the amount of movement the fingers made, and the distribution of keystrokes and among the various fingers and the left and right hand so that they were balanced out, and minimising the number of times a finger was used to type consecutive letters. I optimised it using a corpus of two million words.
With one of my early designs, I thought I had it all cracked, but found that graphics programs such as Photoshop and the like would not work, since I had used key combinations that they use. I had to do a technically challenging redesign. I then added IPA. The keyboard can type phonetically in five languages, including English, French, German, and two others I can’t remember.
That solved my problem of being able to create flashcards in Anki using a single keyboard, and not having to cut and paste IPA characters from the Internet.
I wrote the keyboard driver so that the keyboard runs natively within Windows and is not a keystroke converter program.
I thought about patenting the keyboard, but the cost is quite high to cover the world. It would be a great asset I’m sure. For example, imagine a foreign language school or language lab using the same keyboard for different language classes. You could type all of those languages, and even mix them within the same document. Imagine a newsroom: reporters could type in any of the supported languages they wanted, again with mixing. It really is mind blowing! Only one keyboard would be required, rather than US, UK, International, or country specific like French.
The French Academy were starting a project in 2016 to produce a new French keyboard, and are still not finished as far as I know. I have the answer on the desk in my study! (Somebody tell them.)
With one extra character, Microsoft could make the keyboard able to type in Chinese and Japanese! Unfortunately, they do not include that character.
So, now to the bit that you’ve been waiting for. Why didn’t it work with Scrivener? The reason is that DNS does not support the full Unicode character set. In my view, is it only supports about one third and at most one half of the Unicode character set.
I noticed that when I spoke to Scrivener using DNS it typed my apostrophes as lowercase letter L’s (don’t was shown as donlk). This made me realise that DNS could not interpret the full set of Unicode characters. Another effect of this is that Dragon interprets a space as a +. This explains why my Scrivener DNS types pluses instead of spaces. Modifying my keyboard driver will not solve the problem.
The solution I can now use is to press Windows-Spacebar to switch between a standard QWERTY keyboard and my Romance keyboard. I speak to Scrivener in QWERTY and it types it perfectly. I then switch effortlessly to the Romance keyboard to type anything else I want by hand.
Explanation Ends
Thanks again to the people on the forum who made suggestions. Without them I would not have worked out what the core problem was. Thank you again.