Stupid Good Trick of the Day
One of the programs I use so frequently that I forget how useful it is, is TextExpander. There are many programs that do the same thing: RapidoWrite, TypeIt4me, or on the PC TypePilot.
Way to many uses for these types of programs to go into here, but just one example. I type many words that need accents. Sure I could go to Edit-> Special Characters-> Select the Accented vowel I need, or use the keyboard shortcuts to do this, but why? Instead I specify in Textexpander that whenever I type a word that needs an accent it gets automatically replaced.
So I type “cliche” and it is automatically turned into “cliché,” “differance” becomes “différance,” “Zampano” becomes “Zampanó” (a character in House of Leaves). This saves me so much time over the course of a paper, especially all of those with a bunch of foreign words.
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:47 pm
I’ve avoided using TextExpander and its clones on Macs because they have problems handling italics. As a biologist, I use many latin names for species. These need to be italicized. But because not all fonts have italics versions, TextExpander won’t allow a general short cut for italicized text.
Given that I use MS Word for most of my writing, I also find that its shortcuts work well enough for many of my needs. As for accents, if you use them a lot you can remember the keyboard combos in my experience. You don’t need to go to the Special Characters menu - at least on Macs.
If you need an accent over an “e” or any other vowel, you hit “option + e” at the same time, then type the letter you want accented: é, á, Ã, ó, ú. Granted, this is one more key press than having a shortcut set up. However, it allows you to make an accent for any letter, not just in a few select words you plop into TextExpander.
I recall that you use Quicksilver from your previous posts (me too). This requires that you remember many key combos to launch and manipulate files. If you can remember those key combos, I’ll bet you can remember “option + e”.
Another, inelegant, method is to do a find and replace throughout your entire document for those words you want accented. Then again, that doesn’t help when you need to add large amounts of text at a later time.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
How does it handle words that have an accented form and an un-accented form for 2 different meanings?… like resume and resumé?
May 8th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
why didn’t i think of this??
May 9th, 2007 at 2:54 am
Jimmy,
If you want to differentiate you could set it to if you type “xresume” to turn it into “resumé”, or whatever else you want instead of “x” something like z or punctuation.
May 10th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Dave - so using “xresume” means you have to remember something extra.
Using the built-in accent functions in OSX word processors may be better, as you only have to memorize the global “option+e, vowel” combo.
But to each his/her own.
May 10th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Curt,
I personally would use “option+e+vowel” combo for the above situation, but its nice to have options. Also there are some accents that you can’t get thru the “option+e+vowel” combo. I also find that there are applications which do not render the option+e+vowel correctly. But as you point out using text replacers has the down side of not preserving italics, although there are ways to fix that as well.