TextExpander Citations

In my research I’ve been finding a lot of newspaper articles and transcribing them using automation. But when I’m documenting those articles and linking them to people, I also need to create a source citation. I try to use Evidence Explained-style citations to the best of my ability, but there’s a lot of repeated boilerplate text when writing these up – and there is formatting! Some parts of italicized, so that gets tedious, too.

For example:

“Sleepydale Items,” The Correctionville Argus (Correctionville, Iowa), 27 June 1913, p. 9, col. 4; imaged at Community History Archive - Correctionville (https://correctionville.advantage-preservation.com : accessed 15 April 2025).

Since I’m going through the archives of one newspaper, most of this source citation is not changing with each new item I want to sort.

This is a job for TextExpander!

In this screenshot I’m setting up TextExpander snippet. I’ve put in fill-in placeholders for title, date, page, column, and then auto-populate today’s date in the desired format. Notice I’ve used rich text to italicize the right parts:

I’ve set the abbreviation value for TextExpander to ;ca.

Now when I type ;ca in any text field in any app, TextExpander will pop up a form for me to put in the right values, then it will output the result as formatted text into my app.

Note: This is adapted from an earlier post on Mastodon.