Typinator 7.8

Boost your productivity creating complex text documents

$28.65 From Ergonis, ergonis.com Needs OS X 10.6 or later

One of the handy — and less well–known — features lurking in macOS is the Text panel that you can find in the Keyboard section of your Mac’s main System Preferences. This allows you to create simple text ‘abbreviations’ that automatically expand into longer pieces of text when you type them into a document. For example, I regularly use the abbreviation ‘myadd’ to automatically type out my full address when I’m writing letters or emails.

That’s a really useful time–saver, but the Text option built into the macOS really works best with simple, short pieces of text. If you often need to type out longer text pieces, then it’s worth investing in a specialized ‘text–expander’ app such as Typinator.

At $28.65, Typinator is one of the more expensive apps in this category, but it’s also one of the most powerful. It works in a similar fashion to the Text panel in the macOS, allowing you to create a simple abbreviation — such as ‘myadd’ — and then entering the longer text that replaces the abbreviation in your documents. However, Typinator goes much further by including a number of predefined ‘sets’ of abbreviations. These contain thousands of simple abbreviations that can correct common spelling mistakes in several languages, as well as sets of product names that may have unusual spellings (such as ‘macOS’), or fiddly text that contains subscript.

Typinator also allows you to create longer and more complex pieces of replacement text than most of its rivals, perhaps to store chunks of HTML or programming code. Typinator works with graphics too, allowing you to quickly insert photos, signatures, and logos into documents. It also provides a pull–down menu that lets you include a variety of calculations and numerical functions in your documents. You can add day, month, and year dates in multiple international formats, and even create ‘input’ abbreviations that prompt you to enter data such as currency values or measurements. Admittedly, Typinator will be overkill for most people, but it can earn its keep for professional users who need to create documents with complex text.

the bottom It’s pricey, but Typinator can really save you time when creating standard documents at work. Cliff Joseph

As well as expanding text, Typinator can remember text styles and format too.

Typinator also includes more than 100 code ‘snippets’ that will be useful for programmers and web developers.