Snow Leopard Tips: Symbol and Text Substitution

Sometimes you might just feel bored to type the same thing over and over again, and you are tired of copy and paste the same thing or just too lazy to open the source file. Well, Snow Leopard prepares that for you.

In Snow Leopard, there is an add-on feature that’s included in System Preference’s Language and Text:

Choose “Language & Text”, and choose the new “Text” tab in the menu:

Click on the “+” sign at the bottom, you can start to create your own substitution text, here is one example I did. On the “Replace” filed, I type in “(apple)” (quotation not included), and on the “with” filed, I typed in an Apple Logo,  (If you don’t know how to type in an Apple logo, try to hold “Shift”+”Option”+”K” at the same time). And I make sure the “On” is selected:

And I will say you are done with the setting, now let’s launch your TextEditor, like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or simply TextEdit on Snow Leopard, and type in “(apple)” (quotation not included), you probably won’t see any changes, but just keep typing like you don’t care at all, and you will see that “(apple)” has already been repalced by the Apple logo .

So, what’s so useful about it? Let’s take a look at what Apple has already done for you, if you are going to type in those special symbols like trade mark, then you can just type in TM and Snow Leopard will replace it for you. If you are a university student, you can put in all those special symbols you need in Physics or Math; if you are a businessman and you have to reply your clients with many different email templates, why don’t you set your template and use “(sales_template)”, “(rma_template)” and so on to replace those lengthy texts?

NOTE: Based on my personal experience, this feature won’t work with browsers; so you can only use it within your system’s text editors and then copy them over to anywhere you want.