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Last week I posted a review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 (DNS) and talked about my experiences of using the software. So far it has been a positive experience and I have used DNS for posting to WordPress, writing e-mails, posting to forums and the other writing tasks that I have done.

The other day I got an e-mail asking what it was like posting to WordPress with DNS. I normally use Windows Live Writer so hadn’t actually tried to use it directly in the WordPress editor, so I’ve been giving it a good try out. For the most part it works very well with WordPress, however there are a few minor niggles.

The first issue I noticed was when writing the title of a post. If a similar title has been entered before the browser pops up a box prompting you with the previously entered title. This stops DNS working until you have clicked back in the title box. This isn’t really a big problem once you are aware that it happens and it only takes a moment to set DNS away again. Alternatively you could turn off the option to save entered form information in the browser options.

Another thing I noticed that I thought was a problem that actually isn’t is that when you give the command “new paragraph” the cursor seems to jump two paragraphs in the editor window. On checking the code in the HTML view it doesn’t jump two paragraphs at all and everything is as it should be. It seems that this is just extra space displayed in the editor window and once the post is saved everything looks as it should. I’m not sure where the extra space comes from as the code is just enclosed in normal paragraph tags.

Otherwise things mostly worked well. Occasionally it did miss inserting a space after pausing to consider what I wanted to say and sometimes it did seem to have difficulty in selecting words when using the “select” command. This didn’t happen every time and I do wonder if it might have something to do with my computer being a little short of RAM and being at the bottom of the required specification for using DNS.

Overall, I still found it preferable to use DNS rather than type and the minor niggles didn’t put me off. DNS does report that it is dictating to a non-standard window so presumably won’t be as good as if dictating into a fully supported window. For me it wasn’t really a problem but there are solutions if it bothers you. The first is the dictation box that is one of the DNS’s tools, where you can type and transfer the text or you could use Windows Live Writer or similar like I do, or even just type your post in notepad and copy and paste it into WordPress.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.