I'm in the process of writing a long document and need a List of abbreviations
. I've been reading the LaTeX wiki book about this and have had a play with the packages nomencl and glossaries. What package is the most straight forward for developing a List of abbreviations
? Is there a package I've missed?
I recommend the glossaries
package. It provides several predefined styles and can be customized very well.
Strengths of glossaries
are:
- The very good documentation: besides a normal user's manual it offers a beginner's guide and an upgrade guide (from the predecessor
glossary
), and even an author's FAQ, plus well documented source code - It comes with a Perl script for indexing, running on Linux, Mac as well as on Windows (there's free Perl too)
- It's very actively maintained (current version on CTAN: 4.35 2017-11-14)
- The author Nicola Talbot provides support in online forums, I frequently see her answering user's questions
Working with makeindex
is needed for such lists of abbreviations, which might be a hurdle to overcome. The perl script and the extensive documentation of glossaries
are a great help regarding this step.
Sources for download and documentation:
- CTAN glossaries page
- LaTeX information page of Nicola L. C. Talbot, with links to her packages, documentation, several LaTeX tutorials and related software
-
Thank you, I was looking at glossaries but I was beginning to think it might be too complex. It seems to be able to do lots of stuff I was not going to use. Now it has been recommended I will give it a go. – Darling Jan 12 '12 at 21:47
The acronym
package is simple:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{acronym}
\begin{document}
\section{Acronym List}
\begin{acronym}
\acro{CDMA}{Code Division Multiple Access}
\acro{GSM}{Global System for Mobile communication} % [...]
\end{acronym}
\section{Text}
\ac{CDMA} \ac{CDMA} \acl{CDMA}
\end{document}
Define the acronyms in the text as
\begin{acronym} \acro{CDMA}{Code Division Multiple Access} \acro{GSM}{Global System for Mobile communication} % [...] \end{acronym}
The acronyms will appear where defined. To refer to them, use \ac{CDMA}
which keeps track, presenting first the long form, then the short forms, or \acs
for the short and \acl
for the long forms. See https://ctan.org/pkg/acronym?lang=en.
Call f.ex. pdflatex
twice for the lists.
Pro:
- very simple
- does not require external tools
Con:
- lacks capitalization
-
1\documentclass... \usepackage{acronym} \begin{document} ...\end{document}... – user31729 Dec 29 '17 at 15:30
-
1Much better -- now everyone can copy the code without to have to build the necessary parts around it... – user31729 Dec 31 '17 at 15:45