Why aren't my text shortcuts working?

[d0ugparker]

I'm on an LG L90 with 4.2.2, and I've set up a test string

1112223333​

and its shortcut trigger

pph​

but when I'm in Notepad and I touch

pph​

I never get the substitution. Google keyboard works, but not the default
Android keyboard.

Also, odd, is that when I set up a string, it won't allow a space or a
hyphen in the larger field, implying that I can only substitute words and
not strings.

I'm wondering if this needs a re-install to fix something that's broken.