Instant Text app aids typists of all abilities By Patricia Daukantas GCN Staff Instant Text software, originally developed for fast typists, also aids workers who type slowly or deal with a lot of standardized text or jargon. Instant Text glossaries consist of abbreviations for commonly used phrases and appear on screen below the active document.
Users can compile separate glossaries for different tasks.
The application from Textware Solutions of Burlington, Mass., analyzes a user s documents and compiles short abbreviations of long words and frequently used phrases, product manager Gene Kalb said. The problem with adding macros for such things to word processing programs, Kalb said, is that typists must memorize all the shortcuts they have created. Instant Text instead analyzes groups of stored document files and suggests its own system of abbreviations for each user s vocabulary. It saves groups of abbreviations as glossaries that users can edit manually if necessary, Kalb said. When a user types one of the abbreviations from the glossary, the software prints the entire word or phrase corresponding to the abbreviation into the active document.