Hello. I've got a very specific and possibly convoluted request.
I have some ideas of trying to compose with live 'recordings' of text and having that data control the parameters of a patch in PD.

I assume I would need the following two things:

1. A program which allows me to log and record text being written in a word processor, each keystroke marked in with a specific time.
2. Suggestions as to how I would go about playing back this sequence in Pure Data.

In these times of mass surveillance I can only imagine that there must exist some program that does what I specified in the first point. I know of programs that log and visualise the activity of the computer mouse and mousepad and programs that log every computer activity, primarily used to 'optimise' the efficiency of company employees.

As far as the second point goes, I imagine some sort of external that would allow this text sequence being played back stroke by stroke into a symbol box, which would allow me to give each character of the keyboard a specific action, which it would then trigger.

While writing this I realise that it would quite possibly be easier to have the patch and relevant text-recording programs running and having the data being sent to PD in realtime as this would render the time-marks for the individual keystrokes unnecessary. But the whole point is to have a person write a piece of text with the text-logger running in the background and then transferring that string of data to me to process and play back.

Thank you
M.

Edit: I am running Pure Data extended on OSX Mavericks.

@seed I can't really see how it would properly fit into the programming here. Would you care to explain?

Hi @Hasselbalch

Will you be typing while the PD program is running and the window is selected, or do you want the text to be recorded at all times? The former should be quite easy. Just use the [key] object to identify which keys you're pressing and feed this into [qlist]. When you want to play back, accumulate the key numbers into a list as they come out of [qlist] and use [list tosymbol] or [moocow/bytes2any] to turn the numbers back into text.

@Hasselbalch If you don't want to go the midi route then you could use a text list..... you would need to time stamp the entries (using [realtime] or a [metro]?) so......
12123, D
13465, A
two columns in the text file, and then subtract timings from the first column to set a delay for the re-appearance of each letter......
David.

@LiamG, the first is not hard to pull off, but I would want to gather the keystrokes in the format that qlist uses to read, time - send - value, even when PD is not solely active. Is there such an application for OSX that allows you to have two programs 'write-active' at the same time? So that the given text-writer can write in his preferred word processor while perhaps at the same time writing these into a background-running pd patch.

@whale-av, I didn't know of the realtimeobject, that would certainly make creating the relevant qlist-'score' inside a PD patch do-able.

Given my own programming limitations, I think I'll try to make a patch that would write the timemarked qlist-score as a patch for the write to run in the backround if I can manage to have both a word processor and PD active at the same time.

Thank you for your help so far.

@Hasselbalch You cannot write and read with different processes in osx or any other language. The writer will have to lock the file and have sole access. It might be possible to have the file in two parts so the writer keeps creating a new file...... some text editors will allow file sharing, but it will not work as you wish........ only one user will write or combine their version at a time..... however...... a user can read the entire file at "any?" time...... but........
The other problem is that a text editor will only write to the file every now and then...... holding data in a buffer........ and will not time stamp the letters anyway......
Its an interesting challenge that I will feel compelled to look at over the weekend......
David.

@wale-av, the idea is not to have the text editor itself create the qlist-relevant text file that will contain the time marks and what not, but rather to allow the writer to type in, say, Microsoft Word, whilst the keystrokes are also being logged by a separate application, i.e a PD patch. The actual file and subsequent buffer that the text editor uses should be of no importance, is that is not used for anything, but it's rather a matter of convenience for the writer to be able to write as they would otherwise while it logs the text, if i.e the text which is to be used as a qlist-score is a journal entry. The chosen text editor would, so to speak, only be a convenient "front-end" for the task.

Is it really not possible to do this? A sort of send-application, that inputs both the text in the given text editor and another program simultaneously? To split the keyboard input to be active in multiple applications? I know this would create the possibility of mixing up shortcut commands and alike, but since the keys used by the writer should only be what's usually used in writing (no alt/ctrl/cmd + anything), I think it's possible to avoid.

I think I'll be able to write a PD patch that logs every keystroke, as its given (reference?) number in a textfile with a time mark, by using the key and realtime objects.

@liamg, are listtosymbol and moocowexternals not found in PD-Extended? I can't seem to find them.

Extended definitely has the moocow library built in. Find it in the help browser if you're having trouble creating the object. [list tosymbol] is Vanilla only, but it does the same thing as [bytes2any] so this shouldn't be a problem.

Sorry I can't help with your objective. Maybe try asking on the list?

they could be used to create a “text editor” in puredata itself instead of using another program.
if you want to use a separate program on osx: [hid/keyboard] detects keypresses even if puredata is not the focused window.

storing data in addition to [qlist] : [coll] [msgfile] or list-abs/ library

@Hasselbalch

@seed - Ah, fantastic. Though the numerical value that [hid/keyboard] outputs is not the same value as [key] outputs. I.e according to [key] "a" is 97, but [hid/keyboard] is key_4. Is there no key-to-number standardization?

keyrouter.pd
qwerty hid/keyboard number and letter keys

@Hasselbalch

“tosymbol” is a creation argument for the [list] object
so [list tosymbol] instead of [listtosymbol]

there is also [zexy/list2symbol]

-using the Linux shell could you have it read and load the file on an incremental line set to a delay? Meaning you type as you would write on a text editor to a .txt file and then use say sed to grab or pick up at a newish line after a certain time?

I've wonedered about this too:
How to write a poem and it be denoted to music as I type?

Forgive me if I missed some of thread here/mark, haven't time to time to read all of it.

Hope it helps

https://github.com/AJFaraday/Text-to-music

I made a real-time sequencer that used the keyboard for input.

There is a "metro" driving a counter (time) and two arrays (key number and key time). There is a second counter which is incremented each time a key is pressed, so it points to the next slot in the arrays at all times.
So: each time a key is pressed, the key number is stored in the first array, the time (value of the first counter) is stored in the second array, and the second counter (pointer) is incremented by one.

You can play back the stored data by starting the counter from zero and comparing its value to the first value in the second (time) array. When they match, output the first value in the first (key number) array, and increment the value of the pointer by one…. and so on.

Hope it helps.