Upright font in glossary of mathematical symbols using the glossaries package

Question

I'm using the glossaries package to create a glossary of mathematical symbols, but I can't get it to work with upright text in the symbols. I have tried using both \mathrm and \textup. It only seems to cause problems if there are two or more definitions that use upright text. Here is a MWE to illustrate the problem:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{glossaries}
\makenoidxglossaries


\newglossaryentry{x}
{
name={$\mathrm{x}$},
description={description},
}

\newglossaryentry{y}
{
name={$\mathrm{y}$},
description={description},
}



\begin{document}

\chapter{Example}
\gls{x}
\gls{y}


\printnoidxglossary
\end{document}

The result is a whole heap of Undefined control sequence errors, as well as one Too many }'s error. It works fine if I remove one of the definitions (and its reference), or if I remove at least one of the \mathrm commands.

Is there a way to get math-mode, upright text to work nicely with glossaries?

Answer 1

It works fine if you use \makeglossaries and \printglossaries rather than the noidx versions:

In this case, you must use either makeglossaries or makeglossaries-lite to generate the glossary list. The latter is more limited but does not require Perl and seems to work fine here.

Complete code:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{glossaries}
\makeglossaries
\newglossaryentry{x}
{
  name={$\mathrm{x}$},
  description={description},
}
\newglossaryentry{y}
{
  name={$\mathrm{y}$},
  description={description},
}
\begin{document}

\chapter{Example}
\gls{x}
\gls{y}

\printglossary
\end{document}

Answer 2

As a supplement to @cfr's answer, if you still want to use the "noidx" version, you have to set the sort key. (In fact, you ought to do that even if you use the other answer, or makeindex will view $\mathrm{x}$ as the sequence of characters $ \ m a t h r m { x } $ which will throw the alphabetical sorting.)

Modified MWE:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{glossaries}
\makenoidxglossaries


\newglossaryentry{x}
{
name={$\mathrm{x}$},
sort={x},
description={description},
}

\newglossaryentry{y}
{
name={$\mathrm{y}$},
sort={y},
description={description},
}



\begin{document}

\chapter{Example}
\gls{x}
\gls{y}


\printnoidxglossary
\end{document}