Does a general text editor with these properties exist?

December 14, 2016 9:12 AM

I want to create a document with a preplanned overall structure, but with the ability to click on certain elements in order to insert user defined text. At some point, saving the document in a special way strips out the unused active elements and produces a well-formatted final document.

I'll illustrate with an example from the medical field:

The patient is [not] feeling well today.

The "[not]" is an active element that replaces itself when clicked with user-defined text (in this case, the word "not"). The inserted text, however, should ideally be able to be fairly complex and include nested active elements.

I'm using this example because I've seen something similar in the medical field (the note editor in Practice Partner) and would love to find similar behavior in a more general text editor where I can experiment.

I've had no luck searching MeFi or Stack Exchange, but I suspect that's because I don't know the correct terms to describe this behavior.

If this isn't available, I'll probably try a text expander like AutoHotKey

posted by Emmy Noether to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

TextExpander can do this with any text editor you care to use. It can use nested fill-ins, fill-ins where the user selects from a list, or fill-ins with typed-at-the-time-of-expansion text, among other features.
posted by brentajones at 9:22 AM on December 14, 2016

I'll bet you can do this with Word. Will play with it when I get a couple minutes.
posted by theora55 at 12:09 PM on December 14, 2016

I've never done it, but it looks like you can create a Word form. This includes putting in a list of items to choose from.
posted by cnc at 1:36 PM on December 14, 2016