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Can I use Dragon (dictation software) Full-Text or Select-and-Say feature with SciTE?


Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 and Dragon Professional Individual and Group 14 (the name "Naturally Speaking" is no longer going to be used by Nuance) is terrific software for dictating into a full-fledged word processor like MS Word, but does not have a whole lot of features for plain text editors (except NotePad) and other unsupported applications.

As a result, voice coders have a hard time using Dragon without extensive additional work (usually getting at the natlink extension via vocola or dragonfly, etc.) creating macros, scripts, text-replacements and other commands for entering code and syntax requirements.

Still, one of the best features of Dragon is the ability to select any text in the application viewport and do something with it (copy it, delete it, dictate new replacement text, insert before or insert after, etc.) This is the "Select-and-Say" feature.

Can I enable the Select-and-Say feature in other coder-friendly text editors, such as SciTE?


Solution

  • Yes you can for SciTE (at least in DNSPro13 - see comment below). You have to edit your nsapps.ini file (and restart Dragon) to add the following:

        [SciTE]
        App Support GUID={dd100104-6205-11cf-ae61-0000e8a28647}
    
        [SciTE\Enable Class Names]
        Scintilla=5
    

    I believe that the original setting was Scintilla=1, but with trial and error, the above setting of 5 lets me Select-and-Say not just recently dictated text, but all text in the viewport.

    Only problem I noticed is if you have the "Enable multiple text matches" setting checked in Dragon and you try to select a word that has multiple instances, you won't get the little numbers allowing you to choose which one, and it will look like nothing has happened. If you uncheck that option, you can select the word, and if it is the wrong instrance, just say "select again" as is the usual way to deal with this when that setting is unchecked.

    More info is here (but is dated back to DNS 7 and 8): http://nuance.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3765/~/enabling-full-select-and-say-capability-in-other-applications-for-dragon

    But this is great news for me. Hope it helps some of you voice coders, too . . .