List of acronyms from acro package not displaying properly in a IEEEtran double-column document

Question

I am currently writing an article using the IEEEtran class. I want to use the package acro to manage my acronyms and \printacronyms to display the acronyms list at the beginning of the article. It usually works fine in a single-column document but in double column the acronym spills over the acronym definition if its too long. Also the acronym on the left column should appear in bold but this is no longer the case with IEEEtran.

Here is a minimum working example

\documentclass[10pt,journal]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[template=tabularray]{acro} 

\DeclareAcronym{a}{
    short=aaa,
    long=aaaaa,
}

\DeclareAcronym{b}{
    short=bbbbbbbb,
    long=bbbbbbb bbbbbbb bbbbbbb,
}

\begin{document}

\section*{Nomenclature}

\printacronyms  

\section{Introduction}

\lipsum[1]
\ac{a} \ac{b}   
\lipsum[1]  

\end{document}

which produces:

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

So there are two things going on here: 1. IEEEtran redefines the standard LaTeX description environment which acro defaults to using, 2. You are unsuccessful in trying to apply the tabularray list template.

1. To fix the default acro list we can either redefine the description environment or modify the acro list template to use a different environment. As IEEEtran makes the standard LaTeX description environment available as LaTeXdescription the latter is probably best. We can redefine the acro list description template using

   \RenewAcroTemplate[list]{description}{%   \acroheading  
   \acropreamble   \begin{LaTeXdescription}
       \acronymsmapF{%
       \item[\acrowrite{short}\acroifT{alt}{/\acrowrite{alt}}]
         \acrowrite{list}%
         \acroifanyT{foreign,extra}{ (}%
         \acroifT{foreign}{\acrowrite{foreign}\acroifT{extra}{, }}%
         \acroifT{extra}{\acrowrite{extra}}%
         \acroifanyT{foreign,extra}{)}%
         \acropagefill
         \acropages
           {\acrotranslate{page}\nobreakspace}
           {\acrotranslate{pages}\nobreakspace}%
       }
       {\item\AcroRerun}   \end{LaTeXdescription} }
   

   or to avoid hard-coding the template we can patch it locally when using \printacronyms

   \begingroup
   \let\description\LaTeXdescription
   \let\enddescription\endLaTeXdescription
   \printacronyms  
   \endgroup
   

   

2. Instead to use the tabularray list template, we need to do a few things. acro no longer uses package options to set things like this, preferring \acsetup instead, although I'm not sure that template=tabularray has ever been a valid package option to acro.

   You should be getting a package warning

   Package acro Warning: Unknown option `template'
   (acro)                I don't know the option `template'. Please make sure
   (acro)                there is no typo. Check the manual for help.
   

   Checking Section 5 Setting options of the acro manual we see \acsetup{<options>} is preferred. \acsetup{template=tabularray} yields an error so going to Section 11 Printing the list we see it's \acsetup{list/template=tabularray}. This yields another error

   ! Package acro Error: The template `tabularray' needs the package `tabularray'
   (acro)                loaded on line 21
   

   which is straightforward, loading the tabularray package the new list template is active and compiles successfully.

   

The following code is compilable for either solution, just comment out \acsetup{list/template=tabularray} to get the default description version.

\documentclass[10pt,journal]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{tabularray}

\usepackage{acro}
\acsetup{list/template=tabularray}

\RenewAcroTemplate[list]{description}{%
  \acroheading
  \acropreamble
  \begin{LaTeXdescription}
    \acronymsmapF{%
    \item[\acrowrite{short}\acroifT{alt}{/\acrowrite{alt}}]
      \acrowrite{list}%
      \acroifanyT{foreign,extra}{ (}%
      \acroifT{foreign}{\acrowrite{foreign}\acroifT{extra}{, }}%
      \acroifT{extra}{\acrowrite{extra}}%
      \acroifanyT{foreign,extra}{)}%
      \acropagefill
      \acropages
        {\acrotranslate{page}\nobreakspace}
        {\acrotranslate{pages}\nobreakspace}%
    }
    {\item\AcroRerun}
  \end{LaTeXdescription}
}

\DeclareAcronym{a}{
    short=aaa,
    long=aaaaa,
}

\DeclareAcronym{b}{
    short=bbbbbbbb,
    long=bbbbbbb bbbbbbb bbbbbbb,
}

\begin{document}

\section*{Nomenclature}

\printacronyms  

\section{Introduction}

\lipsum[1]
\ac{a} \ac{b}   
\lipsum[1]  

\end{document}