VS Code - LaTeX Workshop usage of glossaries package

Question

If you are wondering, I am aware of List of glossaries not displaying and VS Code - Latex Workshop - custom recipes file location. Unfortunately, neither solves my problem.

I am using the LaTeX Workshop extension of VS Code (on my Mac if that matters) and am trying to make a glossary from the glossaries package show up. Everything from said package except the glossary at the bottom of the document appears to be working. I believe, based on my reading on GitHub, that the problem is that the makeglossaries script is not being run when I compile my .tex file. Unfortunately, that GitHub link is more than a little above my head (actually I have next to no idea what it is saying), and could use some help implementing its solution (or would appreciate a different solution, if there is a better one).

By clicking on the Settings gear on the LaTeX Workshop extension, I have managed to open settings.json, which currently contains the following miscellaneous settings, which I guess I must have set at some point.

{
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.viewer": "tab",
    "window.zoomLevel": 1,
    "cSpell.userWords": [
        "parameterizations",
        "parameterizes"
    ],

    "editor.snippetSuggestions": "top",
    "editor.largeFileOptimizations": false
}

If you're curious about my current .tex file that is failing, it is the first MWE from the Overleaf Glossaries page, pasted below for convenience.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{glossaries}

\makeglossaries

\newglossaryentry{latex}
{
    name=latex,
    description={Is a mark up language specially suited 
    for scientific documents}
}

\newglossaryentry{maths}
{
    name=mathematics,
    description={Mathematics is what mathematicians do}
}

\title{How to create a glossary}
\author{ }
\date{ }

\begin{document}
\maketitle

The \Gls{latex} typesetting markup language is specially suitable 
for documents that include \gls{maths}. 

\clearpage

\printglossaries

\end{document}

I'm guessing that the things that I've listed may be helpful, but if I can provide anything else, please leave a comment letting me know! By the way, I managed to get the glossary to show up once by pasting something into settings.json, so I know its possible, but I'm not sure what that piece of code was, and I have not been able to replicate the result.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

When you compile with LaTeX Workshop, the extension needs to know, what commands it is supposed to run and in which order. Therefore you have to use so called "recipes" (defines which command, how often and in which order) which consist of different "tools" (one command with some options). You can define both in the settings.json (which you already found). What you want to do now is to define a recipe which runs pdflatex first, then makeglossaries and after that (maybe biber and) pdflatex (twice) again. This is described on the Github page of your third link. The minimum you would need is:

"latex-workshop.latex.recipes":[
        {
            "name": "pdflatex, makeglossaries, pdflatex (2x)",
            "tools": [
                "pdflatex",
                "makeglossaries",
                "pdflatex",
                "pdflatex"
            ]
        },
    ],
    "latex-workshop.latex.tools":[
        {
            "name": "pdflatex",
            "command": "pdflatex",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "%DOC%"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "makeglossaries",
            "command": "makeglossaries",
            "args": [
              "%DOCFILE%"
            ]
          }
    ],

Put it in your settings.json and don't forget to "reload" the window (press CTRL+SHIFT+P and search for it). After that you will have the recipe under the TeX-Extension-Menu (in the left toolbar) under "Build LaTeX project"

You might also want to add other recipes. For example for only one pdflatex run (which will be faster).

{
    "name": "pdflatex",
    "tools":[
        "pdflatex",
    ]
},

I hope it helps!