Most efficient way to use hotstrings for dates
Posted: 04 Aug 2014, 20:28
I'm a transcriptionist, and I'm trying to find a way to shortcut dates. The trick is, we need to type a hard space in between the day and the month, so it's 1^+{Space}January as the output. That's fine, but there are some challenges to defining the hotstrings for this, because ^+{Space} isn't recognised by default as a punctuation symbol, and I don't know how to make it so. Here are the methods I've thought of, in order of preference:
- Define ^+{Space} as a punctuation symbol for all my hotstrings, so adding a hard space doesn't mess up the hotstring detection. This would solve a number of problems for me in my transcript hotstrings.
- Find some way to define parametric numbers at the start of the hotstring and use them in the output. Would probably be complex, but at least I could just type 1jan and get the appropriate output.
- Just make a hotstring for every day of the year, starting with ::1jan::1^+{Space}January and finishing with ::31dec::31^+{Space}December. That's 366 hostrings, which I'd rather not do. It's okay with things like 1^+{Space}o'clock, because there's only 12 of them, but 366 is getting out of hand. At least it would be faster to use than my current system.
- Make a dialog activated by ^!d which parses a date and types out the result. This is annoying because it's slow to use, and the point is to be fast, but it's what I've got right now.