This project is dedicated to making it easier to learn and practice the shorthand system described in My Little Ponish, Theory and Practice by PoisonHorsie.
Specifically, this project encodes Ponish glyphs and rules in Python, and uses Turtle Graphics to simulate writing Ponish by hand.
There are many inconsistencies within the original text, which I believe is working as intended to demonstrate “No wrong spelling” point, but that made it difficult to translate the text automatically.
To ensure consistency with the (internally inconsistent) original manual, scanned text has been manually encoded into an “intermediate representation” that was then mechanically converted into images using Turtle Graphics and compiled into Ponish Manual Mechanised .
I have tried to stay as close to the original as I could, but I did not always succeed, see Editor’s notes and TODOs for clarification of some differences.
The following texts were generated by converting the original text to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) (using American English pronunciation) then un-translating the vowels to fit into the ponish vowel scheme.
Since there is no manually generated “intermediate representation”, the results are not as polished as in the manual. Specifically many of the “letter blends” and affixes were not yet adjusted for IPA and so are not picked up.
Since the original manual is under exclusive copyright by the author, “Ponish Manual Mechanised” has an uncertain status.
I’ve reached out to the author asking them to release the original manual under Creative Commons, they responded that I should feel free to share my modifications, and that they might release a revised and expanded edition under a Creative Commons license, but they do not plan to update the license on the existing version of the manual at this time.
The code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.