The statistics below show speed & accuracy on a range of recent Macs (2010-2012 models) achieved with a brand new voice profile in Dragon Dictate. Even though there is a 3x difference in benchmark scores between the slowest and fastest Mac, the accuracy is nearly identical! The only impact is in the speed of dictation as your Mac tries to keep up with your speech. Compared to a baseline typing speed of 60 wpm - generally considered a competent typing speed - you can immediately get a speed boost of 65% to 100% by using Dragon Dictate on any recent Mac.
Late 2010 MacBook Air (Geekbench: 3,000 and Novabench: 307) Speed: 100 wpm Accuracy: 91% Early 2011 MacBook Pro (Geekbench: 10,300 and Novabench: 1,145) Speed: 124 wpm Accuracy: 92% Late 2012 27 inch iMac (Geekbench: 9,400 and Novabench: 882) Speed: 126 wpm Accuracy: 92% These speed and accuracy figures can be improved significantly by training Dragon Dictate. The above post in an excerpt from the ebook "Dragon Dictate: Fast Track to Prolific Writing on a Mac" published in October 2013.
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Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X Mavericks offer an inbuilt dictation feature that is powered by the same underlying technology as Dragon Dictate. As a result, the dictation commands are nearly identical (see Apple Help document “Mac Basics: Dictation” at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5449 for the list of supported dictation commands in OS X). The inbuilt dictation feature is readily accessible using the convenient shortcut “Fn Fn” and is great for short-dictations. In Mac OS X 10.8, the dictation works by communicating with Apple’s speech recognition servers over the Internet which may result in an annoying lag between when you speak and when the dictated text appears. In Mac OS X Mavericks, you have the option to turn on "enhanced dictation" which does not require an Internet connection and allows you to dictate continuously. The graph below presents dictation speed & accuracy in OS X Mavericks against the alternatives: typing fast, dictation in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and Dragon Dictate, the best-in-class dictation software on a Mac.
Use PDFoo to create links into a PDF - to chapters, to sections, to pages, and even point on a page. Arrange these links in a mindmap for quick lookups. In this example, the mindmap is created using Mindnode Pro (a excellent lightweight app with iCloud integration). Any application that supports rich text notes also supports PDFoo URLs - applications such as Evernote, Curio, DevonThink, NoteShare, Together, VoodooPad, Scrivener and more. You can even embed pdfoo URLs on a web page (such as a blog post or wiki page) and Safari will faithfully launch PDFoo upon request. When you are editing the table of contents (TOC) manually in PDFOutliner, you have the option to either refer to pages using page labels (the numbers in red boxes on each page and below the thumbnails) or using the page numbers printed on each page. The video below shows how to use the "p" prefix for printed page numbers. PDFOutliner has a new application icon! PDFOutliner now provides several techniques to edit the Table of Contents (TOC) in your PDF. The Editing Features Overview document (PDF, 0.2MB, 8 pages) goes into the details.
The PDFoo app is meant to help you link into your collection of PDFs.
Each PDFoo URL is a link to a specific page (and position on the page) in a PDF. You can store these pdfoo URLs like any other rich text, such as in a note-taking app like TextEdit, Evernote, DevonThink, NoteShare, Mail.app etc. PDFoo URLs behave like http: URLs. When you have a http: URL in your notes, and you click it, then Safari app opens that URL. Similarly, when you click on a pdfoo: URL in your notes, the PDFoo app opens the correct PDF and scrolls to the correct page and location. In this analogy, every PDF is like a website, and every page in the PDF is like a page on that website. Here is the workflow: Open the PDF you want to link into. Set the prefix for this PDF (which acts like a web server address). Next, you can create PDFoo URLs in following ways: (1) select TOC items and drag into scratchpad, or copy-paste (2) select any text on PDF page and drag into scratchpad, or copy-paste (3) use the search toolbar button on top-right to search, and drag into scratchpad (4) use the File > Export Annotations command to extract only the highlighted text and note annotations (5) double-click anywhere on the page, a bullseye will appear, and keep mouse down & drag into scratchpad The last technique allows you to link to a very precise location on the PDF page. Use the above methods to build up your notes with links into the PDF. Now, you have lots of text and pdfoo URLs in the scratchpad area. Copy-paste the entire notes into Evernote, TextEdit, DevonThink, NoteShare, Mail.app, your website or any other rich-text app on Mac OS X, for safe-keeping your notes. When you need it, find your note and click on the pdfoo: URLs to have the PDFoo pull up the precise page of the PDF. For example, the following notes snippet has pdfoo URLs that point to 3 separate pages inside a "SEEP Framework Manual (1MB, 123 pages)", and allow me to quickly jump to the specific definition. I assigned the prefix "seep.manual" to this PDF. All the pdfoo URLs were generated automatically by PDFoo when I copy-paste text from the PDF. Be careful to distinguish between “Impairment Losses on Loans” and “Provision for Loan Impairment” seep.manual/Sec1:124/ which are both from the income statement. They should be read in conjunction with the balance sheet item “Impairment Loss Allowance” seep.manual/Sec1:130/. The relationship with the “Value of Loans Written Off” is explained in Box 2.4. How Financial Statements Are Linked seep.manual/Sec1:148/ I build up these notes in the scratchpad area as I browse the PDF, and when done, I save it inside Evernote for long-term access. When I want to refer to this content next time round, I pull up the note in Evernote and click on these links inside Evernote, and PDFoo opens up the PDF and scrolls to the correct location for that link. Moreover, the pdfoo URL feature can be used to build a TOC for the PDF outside the PDF. For example: Conventions used in the manual seep.manual/Sec1:115/ Table 2.2. Income Statement Detail seep.manual/Sec1:123/ Table 2.4. Balance Sheet Detail seep.manual/Sec1:130/ Table 2.5. Classification of Cash Receipts and Payments seep.manual/Sec1:134/ Table 2.7. Direct Cash Flow Statement Detail seep.manual/Sec1:137/ Table 2.9. Indirect Cash Flow Statement Detail seep.manual/Sec1:141/ Table 2.11. Portfolio Report Detail seep.manual/Sec1:144/ Table 2.13. Non-Financial Data Report Detail seep.manual/Sec1:146/ Table 3.1. Summary of Adjustments seep.manual/Sec1:150/ Save these sort of links inside Evernote (or other note-taking fast-searching app) and you can quickly jump to any important location in your PDFs. The 500-page Scrivener PDF manual is well-written and comprehensive. In this post, I've collected some of my favorite features in Scrivener with pdfoo URLs back to relevant section of the Scrivener manual for details. The text below includes pdfoo:// URLs which will work correctly on your Mac after installing PDFoo and assigning the "scrivman" prefix to the Scrivener v2.3.1 PDF manual (5.0 MB). See the post on Taming PDFs with PDFoo and how to Build Mindmaps with PDFoo URLs for details.
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