Shrinking SMS Text
Iris can reduce the size of your SMS text so that it
fits in the infamous 160-characters boundary. Many people routinely does
it after typing a SMS and before sending it. If you are bored doing it
repeatedly, you can let Iris do it for you.
People essentially shrink their SMS messages with one of the following
tricks:
- shorten words, especially when marked by linguistically productive
suffixes or prefixes (e.g. Italian -mente for adverbs like velocemente
> velocem.).
- replace whole words or part of words with smaller graphical representations of the
same or similar sounds (e.g. English U R good for you are good, or
Italian 6 bravo for sei bravo where sei is the name of
the numeral "6").
- replace whole words or part of words with iconic representations of the word
(e.g. the symbol "+" for word plus, or in Italian x for the preposition
per, which is used also for the multiplication operator).
- replace standard orthography with a non-standard one with an equal or similar
sound (e.g. Italian che written as ke to represent the same sound
/ke/, while ce = /tƒe/), or just shorten digraphs (e.g. Italian qu = /kw/
can be shortened in q only, as «qu» is a digraph and thus it is granted
that every «q» is followed by a «u»).
- simply replace words with shorter synonyms.
Iris can use your own profile to apply any of these tricks to your SMS text. A Iris
profile is just a plain text file where each non-empty line contains a text transform
operation; each line has 2 columns, divided by any number of blanks. The first column
represents the input text and the second its output. The first column begins with an
equal sign (=) for literal text or with a dollar symbol ($) for
a regular expression.
When using literals, you can use the underscore character
(_) to represent the presence of a word boundary and the dash (-)
to represent its absence. Thus, in an Italian profile -mente_ means a word
ending with "mente" (as it has a word boundary to the right and hasn't it to the left),
and _più_ matches these letters only when they are part of the whole word
più (thus più is matched but sovrappiù is not).
Some Italian samples:
=a' à
=e' è
=sei 6
-mente_ m.
$ch([eièìéí]) k$1
$([-\.,:;!?()\[\]{}/\\_<>|=+])\s+ $1
In this sample the sequences a' and e' are replaced with
the accented letters à and è; the sequence sei (equal to
the name of the numeral "6") is replaced by 6; the suffix -mente
is replaced by m. in any word using it; any sequence of ch followed
by front vowel is replaced by k plus the vowel (thus gaining 1 character);
1 or more blanks after punctuation are removed.
Once you have created your profile you can replace the default profile with it
by naming it DefaultProfile.txt and copying it to Iris folder.