tersen

Tersen is a fast, flexible abbreviation engine that compresses text in a human-readable fashion. Abbreviations are entirely user-specifiable through a dictionary of textual mappings (e.g., and becomes &). More concise dictionary files and custom abbreviation behavior can be obtained by writing Lua functions called annotations (which pre-process lines in the abbreviation dictionary) and hooks (which alter tersen’s behavior as it abbreviates a text).

Use cases for tersen include:

• Packing more information onto a cheat sheet or reference guide.

• Sending content over SMS or another limited-bandwidth communication channel.

• Obfuscating content so others cannot easily read it but you can.

• Practicing your reading skills in your favorite alphabetic shorthand system.

Tersen is written and extended in Lua. It uses the MIT license. You can install it using LuaRocks:

$ luarocks install tersen

Contents

• Quick start
• Terms
  • Mappings
  • Tokens
  • Sources
  • Destinations
• The tersen dictionary format
  • Basics
  • Annotated mappings
  • Flags
• Annotations
  • Dictionary syntax
  • Built-in annotations
  • Backing functions
  • Function details
• Hooks
• Command-line options
  • tersenrc
• Implementation details
  • Case
  • Unicode
  • Dot-coalescing
  • Performance