1) The library the mod uses to format the string can automatically abbreviate them. For example, %.2s
would print the first two letters of the string for the damage type. It's not perfect (the first letter of "electric" and "explosive" are the same, for example) but it already present in the mod.
2) This one is a bit more complicated. There are 8 damage types in vanilla, plus any a mod could want to add, and mod settings have to be created before I know if they do, and I don't want to bloat up the mod settings list. I can add an option where you can enter in a list of damage types and colors to override the default color for it though.