Can small-caps be automated for abbreviations and acronyms?

Question

Is there a way to force LaTeX to automatically use small-caps for abbreviations and acronyms (or more specifically, strings of two or more uppercase letters)?

Answer 1

I think it's difficult to implement such macros. However, we can do it with help from some preprocess. It easy to write a script to do this. For example, an one-line script of sed:

sed -e "s/\(\s\)\([A-Z]\+\)\([^A-Z]\)/\1\\\textsc{\2}\3/g" foo.tex

You may modify it as your wish.

On windows platform sed have to be installed manually, from GNUWin32 or MingW. Just write a batch file and configure the editor to call it.

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at the glossaries package.

\usepackage[acronym,smallcaps]{glossaries}
\newacronym{WHO}{WHO}{World Health Organisation}
The \gls{WHO} recommends...

Answer 3

If you don't need all of the power of the glossaries package, you could use the acronym package instead. The main idea remains the same. If you want LaTeX to do something with particular types of elements, you must create a markup for them. So if you want to do this within LaTeX itself, (which IMO is preferable) then you will need to explicily mark the relevant elements every time you use them. (This also has the advantage that if you decide later that they shouldn't be in small caps, one change will change them all.) Here's a solution to your problem using the acronym package.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{acronym}
\renewcommand*{\acsfont}[1]{\textsc{\MakeLowercase{#1}}}
\newacro{AM}{}
\newacro{PM}{}
\acused{AM}\acused{PM}

\begin{document}

At 3:00~\ac{PM} John went out.  He didn't return until 2:00~\ac{AM}.
\end{document}

(Note that since textsc{AM} is indistinguishable from AM, we need to change your existing uppercase acronyms to lowercase before making them small caps. This is what the \acsfont macro is doing.)

Answer 4

I've been thinking about this myself, as I will need it soon.

For you, Wouldnt it be much easier to just do this in the texteditor with find x/replace function (\textsc{x})? The list of abbreviations used in a novel won't be very big.

If you use a texteditor that supports Perl style regex or simpler regex, you can even replace all wanted abbreviations in one single run.