Goals and metrics
This page describes the goals of Lesshand, and metrics that are used to evaluate whether Lesshand meets them. See Evaluation for how Lesshand is evaluated against these metrics. See also Requirements for the hard-and-fast rules that Lesshand's abbreviations conform to.
Lossless
Lesshand should be lossless.
Related requirements:
Metric: Round-tripping
Encoding and decoding should preserve more than 99% of English writing.
Metric: Idempotency
Encoding should be more than 99% idempotent. That is, encoding twice should be (almost exactly) the same as encoding once.
Effective
Lesshand should save the user effort.
Related requirements:
Metric: Effort ratio
Encoding should reduce effort by more than 5%.
Metric: Compression ratio
Encoding should reduce text length by more than 3%.
Incremental
You can get started right away and gradually increase your speed as you learn more of Lesshand. You can freely intermix encoded and un-encoded text, i.e., you won't "accidentally" write encoded versions of anything.
Related requirements:
Metric: Decoding normal text
Decoding non-shorthand text should alter less than 3% of the text.