New colour scheme intended for red/green colour blind people
Sat 16/7/05: Dasher working in Korean -
for this to work, you need a font that understands how to combine the elementary
vowels and consonants of Korean into the syllable characters.
This works in Dasher 3.2 under linux (Ubuntu operating system) if you select one of the
korean fonts.
For this version of Korean you need
this alphabet file
and a training text that is
in DECOMPOSED form
like this one. [We need a bigger training text!]
You can decompose
a regular "combined" korean text
such
as this
by using (eg)
decompose.pl korean.txt training_korean_KR.txt
Thanks to Son Yeoyoung and Matthew Parker for help.
We plan another version of Korean, using
the
nested alphabet
when Dasher 4.0 is released (October 2005).
Sat 16/7/05: Dasher working in Persian
New project idea, suggested by a visitor from the the NLM foundation -- could Dasher be useful for hyperlexic people who do not communicate verbally?
Iain Murray pointed out this video game SF Cave (which works in your browser); a lot like one-button mode of Dasher. In fact what it's most like is the now-abandoned metronome mode. (The button in SF cave determines the acceleration, rather than the velocity.)
Tue 5/7/05 Would you like it to be easier to distinguish between the apostrophe (') and comma (,) in Dasher? In the latest alphabet for English, we have introduced two modifications: (1) we render the apostrophe in the dasher display using ⍘ (an underlined apostrophe) by specifying this alphabet symbol:
At the same time, we have added a TAB character, shown by a diamond (◊),
to the English alphabet.
We've coloured its square white/grey, like the other space-like characters.
Here is the alphabet entry.
<s b="9" d="◊" t="	" note="TAB (represented by a diamond)"/>
We have made the same changes in the following alphabets:
Danish
French
German
French with combining characters
It would be great if users could let us know if these enhanced alphabets give any
problems.
Alphabets and training texts for
Mon 13/6/05 DasherViewTriangle screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2
New Korean nested alphabet for 2350 syllables
Two-button Menu Dasher and three-button Direct Dasher: User Trials by Ingrid
koyama has implemented a javascript version of button dasher (with no language model)
Fri 3/9/04 - report by David Ward
The windows version of Dasher works quite nicely on a MS Tablet PC, with no modifications to Dasher.
The pen glides across the screen very nicely and still works with the pen lifted up to 1cm from the screen. I found that my pen frequently lifted from the tablet when using Dasher (unlike PocketPC where it is easier to maintain pressure) so I switched off 'start on tap' and went for 'start on space' instread.
Also, I had to make Dasher no larger than about 12x12cm because of the distance that my hand had to travel.
Typing text into applications works fine -- identically to plain Windows.
Finally, TabletPC has a special input panel (containing character, handwriting recognition and on-screen keyboard) but as far as I can tell, there's no way to add Dasher to the panel.
For people who want to play with Dasher's PPM module:
Here is a link to an example program which uses PPM without the rest of Dasher. You'll need to get the Dasher source tree from CVS and put the files from the zip in a subdirectory below the 'Src' directory. PPMTester.zip
(by Keith Vertanen)
Tue 10/8/04:
Dasher's PPM model is now available in convenient COM packaging. The DLL, test harness, and source code is available at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/kv227/
The COM object's API is documented in ProbModel_API.txt. Let me know if you find any problems.
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@coll.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk:/home/cvsroot/dasher login
and press enter at the prompt. Now run
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@coll.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk:/home/cvsroot/dasher \
co -r stable30 dasher3
and the CVS tree will be downloaded.
Thanks to Doug Dickinson and Iain Murray, an experimental version of Dasher is now running under MacOS X.
Get it now from the download page
Wed 27/11/02: Version 3 is now released for Windows and Linux. You can download it from the Dasher download page. Windows versions for (windows NT, windows 2000, windows XP) and (windows 95-98) are available.
Version 3 is a complete rewrite of Dasher. It should have all the key features of version 1.6.8, and is intended to be far more development-friendly. One of its new features, which we expect many users will appreciate, is the "automatic copy" option, which has the effect of copying the written text into the cut'n'paste buffer whenever dasher is stopped. (Enable this option using the menus.)
Version 3.0.0 prerelease 2 supports several English alphabets. Support for other languages will follow soon. Portuguese is the first language in the queue.
Further information about Dasher version 3
A port to ipaq-running-linux is also being made by Hanna Wallach.
Version 3 was written by David Ward, Iain Murray, Phil Cowans, and Matthew Garrett.
Feedback on version 3 should be sent via the metafaq system please, or else by email to dasher-at-mrao.cam.ac.uk.
Tue 1/10/02:
cliffn has written a front end for dasher v1.6.8 in VB5 which allows to run
Dasher, allows one click to save the text into a file, and
allows the file to be read aloud. With a shortcut to the text file
on your desktop it is easy to edit and copy and paste to another app.
Tested only on Win 2000 but available for download with a right click
on the file name (StartDasherFS.exe) from:
www.datasolutions.co.nz/Download;
this exe file should be put in the dasher folder alongside dasher.exe.
9/02: This text file gives Margaret Cotts's instructions for using Macro Express to connect Dasher 1.6.8 to etriloquist, and further information submitted by other users.
EndPage Alias FrenchCombining.html HiddenPage Combining accents
If you have previously installed another release of version 3, then The windows 2000 version starts and shows nothing but a green square. To fix this, Click options->alphabet, and select any alphabet except "?", then click OK.
Proper documentation about alphabets will be provided in the future. Meanwhile, here are some notes from Iain, and from a user who has figured it out!
Dasher stores
new alphabets and looks for user training files in:
Documents and Settings\
[Earlier versions of windows simply put dasher.rc in the \Program Files\Dasher directory - giving all users the same settings.]
This makes cleaning out test versions of Dasher and hacking the alphabet file directory hard, as it may not be an obvious place to look. However, it is how Windows apps are supposed to behave. Dasher makes an API call to ask where to save this data; it isn't just making this path up.
People wanting to hack the alphabet file directly will probably find it fairly obvious (once they've found the file!).They'll need a text editor that can deal with UNIX text file format. (Not notepad, but anything decent should do.) Otherwise the file will lose its line breaks and be hard to read.
XML purists might want to consult alphabets.dtd for the formal specification.
Others may need to be reminded to use UTF-8 encoding if they use anything outside ASCII.
I am not sure all international issues have yet been fixed - so people creating alphabets may still run into problems.
"I want numerals!" - You can use numbers right now. AFAIK, you can edit the file alphabet.xml to include any of the basic 7 Bit ASCII characters.
If you want to, you can download a modified alphabet definition. It provides an additional alphabet named "mixed limited +nums". This does two things in addition to the standard "english/limited" alphabet:
- it provides numbers
- it arranges small/capital letters beneath each other, which was optional in dasher 1.68.
The location to put this will depend on your OS.