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Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

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peter.s:
I think that except for mentioning Instant Text, rjbull's post blurred more of the subject than it explained.

Some time ago, I trialled every available expander, and believe me there are big quality differences, with any cheap offer not being really helpful beyond 2 or 3 days; PhraseExpress is deemed free for not-commercial use as you state, but then, I suppose that everybody who believed that, AND then tried to really use for some time, will have experienced that Express' notion of "commercial" is different from the users': Avoid writing letters to your landlord or to your employer, you will never know WHERE Express makes the cut... ;-) Btw, they insist on the fact that the tool doesn't phone home for them making the decision you overdid, but that the application has its decision-making inbuilt, but the effect is similar: You'll have to buy or to leave (or perhaps reinstall, or refrain from doing any such letter anymore, I don't remember).

So perhaps this is the perfect, free program for a novelist...

As for text expansion vs. completion vs. correction, this pseudo-distinction is ridiculous; you just have to compare Expander and Express (both Prof.), and you'll see the big difference in their respective approach, and they both are expanders.

But your remark brings up an aspect we did not mention yet: pre-installed vocabularies.

Of course, there is the problem with language, and even with "country versioning" for these, but it's evident that a 500$ medical expander should come with a broad set of special medical/latin/pseudo-latin vocabulary, and a 500$ legal expander should do the same for your country's legal terminology, and indeed, some expanders offer to sell you additional vocabularies.

And of course, some of the expanders come with some English, or even German, French, Spanish general vocabulary, resp. with a vocabulary of typical (or what they think is "typical") mistypings for these languages, thus generating those expanders to be "correcting devices", too, to some degree.

Of course, there is a big problem with the former functionality: Those pre-installed vocabularies come for the profession as a whole, and (hopefully) try to be as complete as possible, and necessarily come with pre-installed abbreviations, whilst most users of such programs will only need a very tiny subset of such vocabularies, and with largely differing frequency demands, i.e. some user needs short abbrevs for some terminology, whilst for other words, longer abbrevs will be ok, and vice versa, and especially, any "suggestion" (cf. Expander's drop-down lists, but which are of the "learning" kind, which makes them quite interesting!) for a broader range of terminology will be a nuisance in your typing - I do not know of any medical or legal vocabulary that would have been cut into (necessarily overlapping) sub-sets, for administrative law, criminal law, commercial law, etc., let alone for several countries... (Perhaps there is such a thing for medics, though.)

So in any case, even with (necessarily expensive) special vocabularies, there is a plethora of tweaking to be done, from the users' side, and that's another very strong argument for Dragon Naturally Speaking, or the other way round, even with very big efforts, expander sw does not become really useful out-of-the-box, hence the absence of such big efforts for most of those applications. (And most of "correction" vocabularies offered are ridiculous: They offer plenty of mistypings nobody would ever type.)

I don't want to sound negative here. ;-)

So let me give you another hint how really "to do it", with expanders, if for some reason you're "into" them, instead of DNS:

Have some set of typical text files (Word, etc.) typed by yourself or by your staff. Then run them in some concordancer sw (depending on the conc. sw, you will have to put those different files into some big file, first, other conc. sw will run different files in some folder one after the other).

This will give you precise frequencies, and you'll import those list(s) into your expander, then devise the right abbrevs to the terms you really need to type again and again, and cf. what I say above: Of course, when needed, you can (for Express, for AHK, and for some others, but as we have learnt, not for Expander in its version 4 yet), instead of mixing up different such original files of different kind, run the conc. sw on just similar files, and then do subsets for "general vocabulary", plus for special vocabularies, and then COMBINE those, within your expander.

Of course, in order to retrieve the "general vocabulary", you would need some special text processing, i.e. some programmable text editor would be needed for processing the conc. sw files, i.e. for moving those text lines/entries from their different output files, into the "general terminology file" which list entries present in several particular output files, or which are present there above a certain frequency level, i.e. if some law court is mentioned more than 2 or 3 times in every subset, it should be transferred to the general set: in Germany, this would be the BGH, whilst the BSG would only be accessible, by abbrev, from the particular "social law" abbrevs subset.

Here, it will hit you in the eye again that Expander's actually missing combining feature for different vocabularies doesn't make it the ideal deal, for the time being, if you're looking out for a good expander.

And finally, folks, try to deliver some practical info, like I do, blathering less. I particularly appreciated
Renegade's current post in the Tizen thread, which could serve as a brilliant example of a good post for anyone who's not enclined to appreciate my posts as a valid example.

rjbull:
please help me understand the differences between text completion, text expansion, and text correction. I looked at the product pages for IT, Breevy, and Typing Assistant and Comfort Keys *appears* to do most of what they can do, but I could be overlooking something.-Innuendo (June 14, 2014, 06:22 PM)
--- End quote ---
Here's the post I was too lazy to look for earlier:  Re: Instant Text V Pro - more than the usual features of a text expander
My gloss on that:

* Text completer
Program comes with a dictionary.  You start typing, program offers a choice of full-text alternatives starting with the stem you've typed, on a "live search," "find as you type" basis.
* Text expander
Program allows you to create your own arbitrary shorthand forms matched to full text: e.g. "ys" = "Yours sincerely"
* Text corrector
You make a typo, program automatically corrects it: e.g. "teh" = "the" Not all programs offer all features.  By these definitions, I believe Comfort Keys only offers text completion, last time I looked.

rjbull:
[Edit at UK time 2014-06-16, 21:18:-]
Apologies if my original post was terse to the point of enigmatic.  DC has several earlier threads on text expanders, and I presumed that you'd be familiar with them.

Corrected John Knowles' links; he has his own domain now.
[/Edit]

BTW, here is a list containing more text expanders/completers etc.

TwinkiePaste http://www.amlpages.com/twinkiepaste.shtml
Auto Text Expander  http://www.autotextexpander.com/  Do not confuse with;
AutoText Typing Assistant  http://www.autotext-software.com/  (freeware by the PhraseExpress people)
Text Accelerator  http://www.textaccelerator.com/
TypeMate  http://www.typemate.net/
Direct Access  http://www.nagarsoft.com/
RoboType 4  http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380508,00.asp
Rocket Typing  http://www.easy-to-use-software.com/html/rocket-typing
Typing Buddy  http://www.supernova-soft.com/c5/index.php/products/speed_typing/
FastFox Typing Expander  http://www.nch.com.au/fastfox/index.html
Type Booster  http://www.typebooster.com/index.php
Smart Type Assistant  http://blazingtools.com/sta.html
SuperKeys  http://www.vellosoft.com/index.php
Typing Assistant  http://www.sumitsoft.com/index.htm
Comfort Software  http://www.comfort-software.com/
Texter  http://lifehacker.com/software/texter/lifehacker-code-texter-windows-238306.php  (written in AHK; cf. jgpaiva's AHK tool, see below

Earlier Donation Coder threads, which deal with text expanders, completers and the
like:

jgpaiva's abbreviations importer
https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=2598.0
link to jgpaiva's AHK tools
https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=3461.0

Harrie's review of Instant Text, and following posts
https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=2631.0

Word AutoCompleter
https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=1036.msg6713#msg6713 (mentions IntelliComplete, AutoTyping, LetMeType, AllChars, Type Pilot)

Auspex
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25182.msg231091#msg231091

External links:

Productivity Talk - Harrie's own forum site for (primarily) Medical
Transcriptionists
http://www.productivitytalk.com/

Jon Knowles site on typing productivity
http://jonknowles.net/

Jon Knowles' ABCZ typing abbreviation system
http://jonknowles.net/abczrule.htm

peter.s:
1. I very much hope that despite of your artificial cut-out into 3 different functional categories, you're aware of the fact that for practical use, they must be re-integrated again? ;-) (In other words, be it correction, be it vocabulary-it-comes-with, be it your-own-abbrevs: they must not interfere, and thus, one expander is more complete as another one, but all of them are expanders, and then they integrate additional functionaly. Sorry for being really nit-pick.)

2. It's always a good idea to not just copy link lists from somewhere, I just tried the Jon Knowles links at the end of the list (remembering the site I once looked into), and boom, between yesterday and today! ;-)

Innuendo:
My gloss on that:

* Text completer
Program comes with a dictionary.  You start typing, program offers a choice of full-text alternatives starting with the stem you've typed, on a "live search," "find as you type" basis.
* Text expander
Program allows you to create your own arbitrary shorthand forms matched to full text: e.g. "ys" = "Yours sincerely"
* Text corrector
You make a typo, program automatically corrects it: e.g. "teh" = "the" -rjbull (June 15, 2014, 03:25 PM)
--- End quote ---

First of all, thank you for digging that list of definitions up for me. Second, Comfort Keys will definitely work as a text completer and a text expander. I don't see where it will act as a text corrector, but the options for this program need a real overhaul. Options that should be grouped together aren't.

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