From the still unreleased manual:
Code Replacement is a feature new to Photo Mechanic which speeds up captioning of often-used terms or names like those used in sports photography, but can be used as a method of shorthand for any type of photography.
To use Code Replacement, you must prepare a plain text file in tab-separated format. You can use any text editor, or a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel™ to generate the text file. The format of the text file is simple. It is comprised of two ‘columns’, the first being the ‘Code’ and the second being the ‘Replacement’. These two ‘columns’ are separated by a ‘tab’ character. Ideally, you want your codes to be as short as possible while being completely unique.
Here is an example Code Replacement text file used for Basketball (Detroit Dunkers and Chattanooga Choo-Choos):
CC8 Dain Bramage
CC17 Rick Perkins
CC43 Brian Calloway
CC13 Dennis George
CC11 Darrin Green
CC2 Aaron Barnum
...
DD41 Stanislav Zarubezhanin
DD43 Paul Kroyd
DD24 Ken Pierce
DD44 Brian Socoletto
DD55 Wally Flannenbaum
DD13 Victor Zenfliende
...
Some of the player’s names are difficult to spell correctly, even if you are familiar with them. Code Replacement makes this problem a thing of the past. All you have to do is get the spelling right once: during the creation of the Code Replacement text file. Once you have created your text file, you need to tell Photo Mechanic to use it for Code Replacement. Open the Preferences dialog and click on the IPTC/XMP tab. Then click on the ‘Code Replacement’ button. A small dialogue will open that will explain briefly what ‘Code Replacement’ is. This dialogue has a ‘Choose...’ button on it which will allow you to load your text file. Once your text file is loaded, you can use ‘Code Replacement’ to speed up your captioning.
Continuing our basketball example, lets say you shoot a game where the Chattanooga Choo-Choos play the Detroit Dunkers. Later after Ingesting your images you begin to individually caption the keepers and want to identify the players in each of the photos. Example: you have a picture with Dain Bramage (CC8) breaking past Stanislav Zarubezhanin (DD41) and you can visibly see their jersey numbers in the thumbnail preview of the IPTC Info dialog. You just type in your codes for each player, surrounded by the ‘\’ character which tells Photo Mechanic to look up the codes and enter their replacements. Photo Mechanic instantly looks up the replacement text and enters it in place of the \code\ and automatically places the cursor at the end of the replacement so that you can continue typing in the rest of your text.
Code Replacement can help make your captions more accurate and can save time as well: just choose a system of mnemonics to help you remember your codes and the pictures themselves will help you derive the codes. In our example we chose CC as an abbreviation for the ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choos’ and DD as an abbreviation for the ‘Detroit Dunkers’. When captioning, we can see that the two players are on the Choo-Choos and the Dunkers, so we can derive the codes from their jersey numbers (8 and 41), giving us CC8 and DD41.
[there would be a graphic here showing Code Replacement in action]
Code Replacement can be used anytime you have commonly entered terms that you tire of entering each time. Code Replacement works in every text field of the IPTC Info and IPTC Stationery dialogues.
HTH,
-Kirk
