Acronyms/Shorter Names Generation

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

Sometimes when I am writing a note, I might be referring to terms that I use too much. For example, I am learning notes from my business school classes and terms such as short-term, fixed costs, Board of Directors, market size, … are terms that I refer quite a bit.

When I am writing these common terms, I would then have shorter names such as “ST,” “FC,” “BoD”, “MktS”. It saves me time when typing and provides a cleaner, tidier perspective of the notes

But what if I share these terms with another person who doesn’t use them, or if I come back to this note and I forgot its definition?

Proposed solution

I was thinking of two potential solutions. (A) To have a section in the Vault in which we could start generating our own list of acronyms/short-names and its longer version. (B) When typing a text in the note we could create the name directly in the note (something like ‘Fixed Cost’–>‘FC’ so that in the rest of the document we could just type FC.

5 Likes
2

I use Typinator for this, on macOS. Provides a lot of flexibility and is portable beyond Obsidian. Would a text-replacement app like that serve the purpose you’re looking for?

1 Like
3

I haven’t tried Typinator although the benefit from this feature would not only come from typing faster but having a faster and tidier reading.

For instance, I would have

  • “The BoD approved the new PL in MX that is projected to grow 10% YoY”
    versus
  • “The Board of Directors approved the new production line in Mexico that is projected to grow 10% year-on-year”

My idea is that if I can’t remember what YoY refers to, I could hover the text and it would show the term (or potentially link to the list acronyms)

1 Like
4

I would argue that the benefits of such a capability goes beyond just typing faster.

I regularly use tons of acronyms and add tables of accronyms and their definitions at the beginning of documents that I want to share with people. I want to be able to create a note specifically for initials/accronyms such as

AI :: Artificial intelligence
ML :: Machine learning
etc.

Then, when creating another document, I can use these predefined initials using a specific code such as AI (:AI:). The result would appear as AI (Artificial intelligence)