on the cheap and sleazy side (www.cheapandsleazy.net)

By G.D. Warner

Phonetic Tables and the digitalCAT Logic Editor

Modifying digitalCAT to Work With the Phoenix Theory Realtime Applications Documents

 

Back in 2003 or so while I was still in theory, I discovered something on the Phoenix Theory site called "Advanced Realtime Writing Applications: Expanding Your Writing Vocabulary," which was intended to teach the advanced Phoenix Theory writer how to write foreign names and etc. in much fewer strokes than it would take using just fingerspelling.

Alas, it was too much for this struggling theory/speedbuilding/legal terminology/medical terminology student (not to mention the fact that my instructors didn't know it was available), so I never got to it while I was in school.

Fortunately, I rarely throw stuff out, so I still have the two documents in question -- "Advanced Realtime Writing Applications: Expanding Your Writing Vocabulary," and "Advanced Theory Applications: Compound Words" -- in my CR Stuff folder (about 518 707 MB in size!) ... and, while doing a search for something completely different, I began looking through the Vocabulary document ... and this article is just one of the results.

Hope it's of some use!

-o0o-


On this page, you can find a document written by Phoenix Theory author Carol Jochim entitled, "Advanced Realtime Applications: Expanding Vocabulary" which teaches the Phoenix Theory writer how to build a phonetic table to handle those difficult-to-stroke names like Quantico, Steinback or Kazakhstan, without resorting to defining the names before-hand, or finger-spelling them.

Alas, there are no pictures to accompany the narrative ... and worse, it seems to have been written for people using Case Catalyst ... and an early version, at that!

One day, I was digging around in my digitalCAT folder (yes, on my Mac, running under Wine) ...

digitalCAT folder, in Wine

digitalCAT Folder, in Wine

... and I found something called a "Logic Editor." Curious, I double-clicked it, and got an Open File dialog box:

digitalCAT Logic Editor File Open Dialog

digitalCAT Logic Editor File Open Dialog

I picked one of these at random (StenEd(tm).lgc, if you're curious), and was faced with this window:

DigitalCAT Logic Editor:  File Opened

DigitalCAT Logic Editor: File Opened

Alas, this window doesn't have an option to create a new file, so I was stuck for a moment ... so I closed the Logic Editor.

Eventually, I remembered the ol' Right-Click-and-Drag trick (which you (hopefully) still remember from reading Got Fear?), and I found the StenEd file, did the right-click-and-drag trick, and renamed the copy Phoenix.lgc ... but do yourself a favor and pick a file that is smaller than that one! Nearly everything shown in the Logic Editor's File Open dialog is 132 kb in size ... but the StenEd logic file weighs in at a hefty 152 kb!

As you might guess, this makes for some extra work later, as you'll be deleting stuff you don't need.