Keeping in sync with Plover

[didoesdigital]

Plover removes bad strokes and adds useful suggestions irregularly from comments in this issue: Dictionary Suggestions #400.

Keeping dict.json in sync with Plover's main.json may help newcomers learn from Typey Type for Stenographers without Plover's misstrokes as well as keep up with Plover's main community dictionary. If they get far out of sync, it will be harder for beginners to understand what strokes to use, why certain translations exist, and have a harder time choosing between them.

The current practice for Plover developers is to delete comments on the suggestions thread as they get merged to the dictionary. To preserve the history of those comments and reasoning for dictionary changes, we might continuously commit changes, referencing the original comments.

[didoesdigital]

To avoid getting ahead of releases of the Plover dictionary with Plover app releases, we could hold back the changes here on a separate branch. When a Plover version is released with a dictionary update, we can merge the branch back into master. Meanwhile, anyone that wants the bleeding edge dictionary can use the branch dictionary.

[didoesdigital]

No releases of the Plover app have been made. The open PR has conflicts almost beyond repair. This approach needs rethinking.

[paulfioravanti]

I'm of the opinion that this issue can be credibly closed as a wontfix.

I think Mirabai's steno dictionary at the time, that became main.json for Plover the theory, should really be considered a "starter" dictionary that every Plover user can take, build on, change, or ignore. Mirabai has said herself in the Plover Discord that her dictionary has, unsurprisingly, evolved significantly since it was first gifted to the Plover repo. Understandably, there does not seem to be the intention to merge those changes, or any other future changes, into main.json, and take up that continued maintenance burden.

I do not think main.json can really be classified as a "community" dictionary either, both due to it not being continually updated publicly by its original author, and also due to the current stalled state of Plover development, where suggestions for additions to main.json by the wider Plover community are stuck in limbo (of course this could change in the future).

Therefore, I think it's okay to continue to have current main.json be at the heart of Typey Type, with any custom changes necessary that make life easier for beginners (like removing potentially confusing mis-strokes, adding condensed strokes that are compatible with Plover theory etc), and just continue to allow any user that needs more than that, or wants to use another theory like Lapwing, to upload their own dictionaries for practice, as per what Typey Type can already do.

If main.json does end up becoming a real "community" dictionary, with contributors from across the userbase being accepted, then the issue of keeping in sync with it can potentially be re-visited.