Is there a good way to get hover text references on some of my math symbols?

I am writing some lecture notes that are intended to be accessed through a computer most likely. They are kind of mathy and I was hoping that there was some way for me to clean up the number of words on the page using tooltips/hovering text in a systematic way that won't require a crap ton of copy-pasting.

The idea is, I want the sections to be relatively self contained, so they can be read in arbitrary order. However, this requires a ton of extra text in terms of redefining things that I already defined.

For instance, I introduced some manifolds, called M and W, and a map between them, called Phi, in the opening section or two of the text. In some later section I want just be able to talk about M, W, and Phi without taking up a half of page dedicated to redefining them. So if I were to write something like

"Consider M, W, and Phi"

the student could hover over M,W, or Phi and view their definitions. Something like "M is a differentiable manifold of dimension d," and even better if I can make differentiable manifold linkable (I have a makeshift glossary which is just a bunch of labeled text).

I saw a similar question on here mentioned cooltooltips as a package for making tooltips, but it looks very cumbersome to use if I want them every time I reference anything.

Thanks for the help!

Please have a look on the pdfcomment package and its \pdftooltip command -- it allows mathematical \LaTeX markup.

Alternatively I refer to a similar question I posed myself some months ago

pdftooltip comment with better markup

A StackExchange User provided a very sophisticated solution to my question.

Here is a MWE using a simple mathematical formula, disregarding better markup, just as simple example, however, without references:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pdfcomment}

\begin{document}
$\pdftooltip{\int}{The integral sign} \left({\cos x}\right)\; dx = \sin x + C$
\end{document}

• An example of how to use pdfcomment would make this into a real answer. – egreg Feb 16 '14 at 10:26
• @egreg: You are right, but at the moment giving an 'answer', I did not remember the precise syntax and additionally no working LaTeX installation available – user31729 Feb 16 '14 at 11:06