Incidentally, for those interested, the website of the National Court Reporters Association has a brief history of shorthand (skewed of course to the English language-based developments):
http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/shorthand.shtml A summary of the development of the Stenograph machine that largely displaced shorthand in professional contexts: http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/machine.shtml And a discussion of Computer Assisted Transcription (CAT), the technology which has since displaced the Stenograph in almost all contexts: http://www.ncraonline.org/about/history/CAT.shtml CAT is what most courtroom reporters now use and what makes realtime captioning for TV possible, for example. In part it is this trajectory which makes shorthand encoding in Unicode a matter of historical anachronism, and why there are no real application vendors battering down the Unicode Consortium doors for a Unicode encoding. All the serious users of shorthand long ago abandoned it for a computer-assisted technology that combines rapid keying systems with dictionary lookup for realtime transcription into normal text. In such systems there is no need to "encode" shorthand as Unicode characters. --Ken
