Typinator power tips
This page contains a collection of useful power tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Typinator. We hope you find some of these power tips useful for your work flow.
If you want to share your own power tip with the Typinator community, please contact us. We will gladly publish your contribution here.
Overview
- Advanced text formats and hyperlinks
- Convert clipboard to plain text
- Custom search terms in Quick Search
- Date Calculation for "next Saturday", etc.
- Input fields with default values
- Inserting multiple spreadsheet cells
- Inserting pictures in spreadsheets
- Inserting random text
- Literal {x} patterns
- Phrases depending on the time of the day
- Pictures with links
- Presets for options
- Quickly find a snippet
- Removing non-digits from numbers
- Replacement in the middle of a word
- The power of Typinator forms
- Triggers for expansions
- Typing abbreviations without expanding them
- Using input fields for counters
- Using Typinator as a clip collection
- Developer tip: Typinator, PopChar, and the Clipboard
Literal {x} patterns
Typinator uses the notation {x} for time and date variables. For example, {M} stands for the current month, and {a} gets replaced by AM or PM.
In some cases, you may want to include such a pattern literally in an expansion and do not want Typinator to make a replacement.
For example, if you are using LaTeX, the notation \'{a} is used for á, and you don't want Typinator to change that to \'AM or \'PM. Another example is a snippet in which you mention that the Typinator tag {M} creates the current month.
To tell Typinator that you do not want it to replace a tag with its special meaning, just insert periods after the opening and before the closing brace. Typinator then removes the periods and leaves everything else intact. In the LaTeX example, use \'{.a.} to produce \'{a} for á.
And what if you want to use \'{.a.} literally in an expansion? Just double the periods (\'{..a..}), and Typinator will remove the periods next to the braces.
BTW, you do not need to insert periods for every brace that you mean literally. If the contents of the braces do not have special meaning for Typinator, it will leave them as they are. For example, you can use braces in source code snippets without periods. You need to insert the periods only when you find that Typinator applies some special meaning to the braces.