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.
Lua and LuaRocks are required to run tersen.
Direct installation via LuaRocks is recommended in most cases:
luarocks install tersen
For development,
clone this repository and run make;
LuaRocks will then install tersen from the sources.
In either case, tersen will then be installed on your system path.
Complete documentation can be found on Read the Docs A quick-start guide is included.