The glossaries package: a guide for beginners
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1. The glossaries package a guide for beginners Nicola L C Talbot 2011 04 02 Abstract This document is a brief guide to the glossaries package for beginners who find the size of the main user manual daunting and as such it only covers the basics For more advanced topics see the main user manual glossaries user pdf Contents 1 What Do I Need 1 2 Getting Started 1 3 Defining a Term or Symbol 2 4 Using a Term 3 5 Acronyms 4 6 Displaying the Glossary or List of Acronyms 5 1 What Do I Need You need to have the glossaries package installed You also need to have the fol lowing packages installed ifthen xkeyval at least version 2 5f xfor amsgen and etoolbox You may also need longtable supertabular and array depending on what glossary style you want to use All these packages can be downloaded from CTAN if you don t have them installed See Installing things on a La TeX Sys tem for further assistance In addition you need an indexing application The glossaries package is con figured to use either makeindex or xindy Makeindex should be available on all TeX systems It s possible you may not have xindy installed but it can lhttp www tex ac uk cgi bin texfagq2html label installthings be downloaded from the xindy home page The glossaries package provides a helper Perl script called makeglossaries which will act as an interface to makeindex or xindy If you want to use makeglossaries you need to hav2. a hyperlink to the relevant entry in the glossary if hyperlinks are defined There are also versions that convert the first character to upper case if you need to start a sentence with a term G1s label nd o Glsp1 label For example Glspl electrolyte usually exist as solutions of salts bases or acids Note that these commands all have two optional arguments that aren t dis cussed here but they are described in Section 6 in the main glossaries user man ual Don t use these commands in moving arguments such as those used by chapter sectionand caption You can instead use commands such as glsentrytext label See Section 9 in the main glossaries user manual 5 Acronyms The glossaries package also allows you to define acronyms By default acronyms will be added to the main glossary but if you use the acronym package option acronyms will be placed in a separate list of acronyms usepackage acronym glossaries There are other options that govern how acronyms appear For further details see Section 13 in the main glossaries user manual Acronyms must be defined before use and are defined using newacronym label abbrv full where label is the label identifying the acronym abbrv is the abbreviated form and full is the fully expanded text For example newacronym label svm support vector machine Once the acronym is defined it can be used in t
3. anal from mouth to stomach plural cesophagi If the name starts with an accented character the first character must be grouped newglossaryentry elite name e lite description select group of people sort elite or newglossaryentry elite name lite description select group of people The name can also be a symbol but you will also need to specify the sort key For example newglossaryentry pi name ensuremath pi description ratio of circumference of circle to its diameter sort pi It s also possible to have a name and a symbol For example newglossaryentry set name set description a collection of objects symbol ensuremath mathcal S Note however that not all glossary styles display the symbol in the glossary 4 Using a Term Once you have defined a term you can use it in the document The glossaries package provides a number of commands that are described in Section 6 in the main glossaries user manual Here I shall just cover the main commands gls label This prints the term associated with label Using the example in the previous section gls oesophagus will display cesophagus If the hyperref package has also been loaded the term will also be hyperlinked to the relevant entry in the glossary glspl label This prints the plural of the term associated with label so glsp1 oesophagus will display cesophagi Again the text will be
4. ckage If you have used the xindy package option you must use xindy otherwise you must use makeindex The glossaries package comes with a convenient Perl wrapper that calls the appropriate indexing application the required number of times with the required options If you have Perl installed all you need to do is type makeglossaries myDoc in a terminal or command prompt If you are using a front end such as WinEdt or TeXnicCenter and you want it to automatically run makeglos saries when you build your document you will need to consult the front end s documentation If you don t have Perl installed you will need to call makeindex or xindy explicitly This is more complicated and is described in Section 1 3 in the main glossaries user manual 3 Once you have successfully run the indexing application you need to build ATEX your document again see step 1 Note that sometimes you may have to repeat steps 2 and 3 The appearance of the glossary depends on the glossary style in use The default style uses the description environment but there are many other styles available These are described in Section 15 in the main glossaries user manual By default a number or list of numbers will appear after each entry in the glossary This indicates the page or pages on which the term was used This list can be suppressed using the nonumberlist package option usepackage nonumberlist glossaries Further information can be foun
5. d in the main glossaries user manual glossaries user pdf and there is also an article on the glossaries package on the ATEX Com munity s Know How section 3http www latex community org
6. e Perl installed but you can use make index or xindy directly if you prefer 2 Getting Started The most obvious things to do is to remember to load the glossaries package usepackage glossaries Note that the glossaries package must be loaded after the hyperref package con trary to the general advice that hyperref should be loaded last The glossaries package should also be loaded after html inputenc babel and ngerman If you want to use xindy rather than makeindex to sort the glossaries you need to specify this in the package options usepackage xindy glossaries Other package options are described in Section 2 in the main glossaries user man ual Next you need to enable the creation of the various external files that are required by the indexing application This is done using makeglossaries 3 Defining a Term or Symbol You must define terms or symbols before you can use them in the document This is best done in the preamble Each term is defined using newglossaryentry label settings where label is a unique label used to identify the term The second argument settings is a key value comma separated list that is used to set the required information for the term A full list of available keys can be found in Section 4 in the main glossaries user manual The principle keys are name and description For example to define the term electrolyte newglossaryentry electrolyte name e
7. he same way as any other glossary term with commands such as gls and glspl On first use the de fault will display full abbrv On subsequent use only the abbreviation will appear For example A gls svm was implemented If this is the first time this term has been used the above would produce A support vector machine svm was implemented otherwise it would produce A svm was implemented You can reset an acronym so that the next use fully expands it again using glsreset label or you can reset all acronyms using glsresetall For further details on resetting and unsetting acronyms see Section 14 in the main glossaries user manual 6 Displaying the Glossary or List of Acronyms In order to display the sorted list of terms you first need to use printglossaries at the place where you want the glossary and list of acronyms to appear Note that printglossaries won t produce any text the first time you create your document as an external indexing application needs to be used to sort and collate the entries Creating the completed document is therefore at least a three step process Suppose your document is called myDoc tex then you need to 1 Build TgxX your document either by clicking on an appropriate but ton in your front end text editor or by typing the following at a termi nal command prompt latex myDoc 2 Run the indexing application on the external file s created by the glossaries pa
8. lectrolyte description solution able to conduct electric current 2http www xindy org In the above example the label and the name happen to be the same In the next example the name contains a ligature but the label doesn t newglossaryentry oesophagus name oe sophagus description canal from mouth to stomach plural oe sophagi In this case the label is oesophagus Note that in this case the plural has to be specified using the plural key since it isn t formed by simply appending the letter ugr When you define terms it is important to remember that they will be sorted by an external application that doesn t interpret 4TEX commands Xindy is a little more TEX aware than makeindex but for this example they will both mis sort oe sophagus Xindy will ignore the oe part and will sort it according to sophagus so it will be placed with the terms starting with an s Makeindex on the other hand will sort it according to oe sophagus which starts with a symbol the backslash so it will end up in the symbol group You therefore need to specify how to sort the term newglossaryentry oesophagus name oe sophagus description canal from mouth to stomach plural oe sophagi sort oesophagus Note however that if you use the inputenc package and xindy you can use the encoded character rather than oe and xindy will sort it correctly newglossaryentry oesophagus name esophagus description c
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