Short Form

The short form of an expansion glossary entry is the key to reach the corresponding expansion. It can contain:

• letters 'a' to 'z',
• numbers '0' to '9',
• hyphens and underscores.

In most traditional softwares, the short form is the exact abbreviation you need to type, to reach the expansion.

Instant Text introduces more flexibility, by allowing you to skip letters inside the short form: an abbreviation must start with the first letter of the short form, and it must be a subset of letters of the short form, that appear in the same order. Stated in another way, the first letter is needed but you can drop several of the other letters.

As a result, a short form allows countless possible abbreviations to reach an expansion. Instead of defining a unique abbreviation, the short form defines a complete scope of possible abbreviations.

Word Short Forms

The best possible short form for a word is the word itself! This assertion may seem surprising.

A short form like virtually for a word expansion virtually seems rather long at first sight:

But don't get it wrong, with Instant Text, longer short forms don't imply longer abbreviations, they just enhance a larger scope of possible abbreviations. Here are just a few:

With a traditional expander you would probably rather define virtly to expand into virtually, and that would be the sole abbreviation you could use, to reach that word.

As this example shows, the flexibility of Instant Text allows to reach the same expansion, with multiple possible abbreviations, requiring thereby less memorization.

Phrase Short Forms

The default convention for a multi-word expansion is to use the initial letters of each word, as in the following example:

but there is no obligation to do so. You have complete freedom of choice, So you may also well define a short form like sos for this same phrase: