Title half-assedly says it all. ;D

I'm sure some of you already know Lifehacker Texter

Lets you define text substitution hotstrings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day.

The program works great (albeit slightly buggy). 

WHAT I WANT
Basically, Texter unicode compatible.

WHY
I'm learning Mandarin Chinese and typing Pinyin markers is a major PITA.

Texter has the ability to greatly simplify my task by replicating this online flash-based Pinyin Word Processor as I'm typing my document!

There are a shitload of people on the net who want to do something like this, but I just can't find an alternative. :(

I know about Accents 1.0 by donation coder, but it isn't unicode aware (I'm using it right now, I know) and also the functionality I want is closer to Texter.

I want to type the text in bold, which will convert it to the text on the right, respectively (see bottom).  Accents will not do this, but Texter will. Hell, texter is even lightweight AND portable.  Dammit, if only it was unicode aware. I know the Texter Source Code was released to the public.


a1  ā 
a2  á
a3  ǎ
a4  à