Howto achieve capitalized description in glossary table?

Question

I use the glossaries package to generate my acronym list. Since I use the acronyms in the text I have to write the description lowercase. Thus, I have a lowercase description in the acronym list. Can I change that behaviour?

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
%
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
%
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{hyperref}% Must now be the second-last package that is loaded
\usepackage[acronym]{glossaries}% Must be last package, loaded after hyperref
%
\newglossaryentry{htdoc}{name={hypertext document},description={Text file with references to other content via hyperlinks}}
%
\newglossaryentry{web}{name={World Wide Web},first={World Wide Web (WWW)}, text={WWW},description={A distributed system of linked hypertext documents}}
%
\newacronym{test}{Test}{Lowercase is what I want}
%
\makeglossaries

\begin{document}

% Test of glossary entries
% 1. Capitalization
Here is the acronym in the text \gls{test}
% HTML should not appear in acronym list because not cited and not added
%
\printglossaries
%
\end{document}

That is what I get:

Answer 1

Something like this works for \printglossaries:

\let\firstchar\lowercase
\let\oldprintglossaries\printglossaries
\def\printglossaries{\let\firstchar\uppercase\oldprintglossaries}

\newacronym{test}{Test}{\firstchar{t}his is a test}

Working example

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
%
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
%
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{hyperref}% Must now be the second-last package that is loaded
\usepackage[acronym]{glossaries}% Must be last package, loaded after hyperref
%
\newglossaryentry{htdoc}{name={hypertext document},description={Text file with references to other content via hyperlinks}}
\newglossaryentry{web}{name={World Wide Web},first={World Wide Web (WWW)}, text={WWW},description={A distributed system of linked hypertext documents}}
%
\let\firstchar\lowercase
\let\oldprintglossaries\printglossaries
\def\printglossaries{\let\firstchar\uppercase\oldprintglossaries}

\newacronym{test}{Test}{\firstchar{L}owercase is what I want}
\makeglossaries

\begin{document}

% Test of glossary entries
% 1. Capitalization
Here is the acronym in the text \gls{test}
% HTML should not appear in acronym list because not cited and not added
%
\printglossaries
%
\end{document}

NoIdx version

If you use \printnoidxglossaries instead, use these redefinition instead:

\let\firstchar\lowercase
\let\oldprintnoidxglossaries\printnoidxglossaries
\def\printnoidxglossaries{\let\firstchar\uppercase\oldprintnoidxglossaries}

Answer 2

You could use the description option of glossaries which is probably meant to add a different description to the list of acronyms than the long form of the acronym. But this means it also works if description and long form only differ in the first letter. This is obviously not as handy as David's solution since you have to type each form twice...

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[acronym,description]{glossaries}
\makeglossaries

\newacronym[description=This is a test]{test}{Test}{this is a test}

\newglossaryentry{web}{
  name={World Wide Web},
  first={World Wide Web (WWW)},
  text={WWW},
  description={A distributed system of linked hypertext documents}
}
\begin{document}

Here comes \gls{test}

Here comes \gls{web}

\printglossary[type=\acronymtype]

\printglossary
\end{document}

Answer 3

I think you should define the description of all your acronyms as needed in the text, i.e., lower-case. Then, you can redefine the glossary style to produce the output you desire. If I understand you correctly, you want the first letter of the explanation to be capitalized. This can be achieved as follows (note: I am not really familiar with tex programming or the glossaries.sty code - this is what I managed to do after encountering the same problem):

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[hyperfirst=false,toc,acronym,nogroupskip,nomain,indexonlyfirst]{glossaries}
\newglossarystyle{csuper}{%
%do everything as in the "super" style: (cf. glossaries-user.pdf Example 22 (Creating a new glossary style based on an existing style))
\setglossarystyle{super}%
%Here, I copied the code from glossary-super.sty which defines the \glossentry command.
%Note how the original use of "\glossentrydesc" was exchanged for "\Glossentrydesc".
  \renewcommand{\glossentry}[2]{%
    \glsentryitem{##1}\glstarget{##1}{\glossentryname{##1}} &
    \Glossentrydesc{##1}\glspostdescription\space ##2\tabularnewline
  }% 
%
%additionally, I usually want the glossary to be wider and to have dots similar to the table of contents:
\setlength{\glsdescwidth}{0.75\linewidth}%
\renewcommand*{\glspostdescription}{\dotfill}%
}
\setglossarystyle{csuper}

\newacronym{ccdf}{CCDF}{complementary cumulative distribution function}
\newacronym{awgn}{AWGN}{additive white Gaussian noise}
\newacronym{mer}{MER}{message error rate}

\makeglossaries

\begin{document}

Here is the acronym in the text \gls{awgn}. Bla bla blah \gls{mer}. At the Beginning of a sentence, we have to capitalize as follows. \Gls{ccdf} blah blah blah \gls{ccdf}.

Bla bla blah \gls{mer}. Blah blah blah \gls{ccdf}.

\printacronyms[title=List of Acronyms]

\end{document}

Hope that helps.

Answer 4

I know, this is an old question, but I managed to elegantly provide acronym descriptions that automatically get transformed to lowercase, while leaving proper nouns and abbreviations untouched.

I define a new command \MakeLowercaseEscaped that transforms all characters to lowercase except those that have been put in curly braces (similar to titles in BibLaTeX entries). Thereby, I can provide capitalized acronym descriptions that automatically get transformed to lowercase. On the downside, it requires BibLaTeX as I borrow internals from BibLaTeX's \MakeSentencecase.

\makeatletter
\newrobustcmd{\MakeLowercaseEscaped}{%
  \let\blx@mksc@endhead\relax% prevent capitalization of first character
  \blx@mksc@ii}
\makeatother

Afterwards, \newacronym can be redefined to lowercase the description when using the acronym in the document body:

\let\oldnewacronym\newacronym
\renewcommand\newacronym[3]{%
  \oldnewacronym[sort=#1,description=#3]{#1}{#2}{\MakeLowercaseEscaped{#3}}}

Now, acronyms can be defined with curly braces to avoid lowercasing proper nouns and abbreviations:

\newacronym{dsl}{DSL}{Domain-Specific Language}
\newacronym{egpu}{eGPU}{Embedded {GPU}}
\newacronym{latex}{\LaTeX}{{Lamport} {TeX}}

Using curly braces is pretty elegant as they will not mess up typesetting, if \newacronym is not redefined or BibLaTeX is not available.

MWE for solution:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[acronym]{glossaries}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\makenoidxglossaries

\makeatletter
\@ifpackageloaded{biblatex}{%
  \newrobustcmd{\MakeLowercaseEscaped}{%
    \let\blx@mksc@endhead\relax% prevent capitalization of first character
    \blx@mksc@ii}
}{\newcommand\MakeLowercaseEscaped[1]{#1}}% fallback
\makeatother

\let\oldnewacronym\newacronym
\renewcommand\newacronym[3]{%
  \oldnewacronym[sort=#1,description=#3]{#1}{#2}{\MakeLowercaseEscaped{#3}}}


\newacronym{dsl}{DSL}{Domain-Specific Language}
\newacronym{egpu}{eGPU}{Embedded {GPU}}
\newacronym{latex}{\LaTeX}{{Lamport} {TeX}}


\begin{document}

\Glspl{dsl} can be used to generate code for an \gls{egpu}.
This document was produced with the typesetting system \gls{latex}.

\printnoidxglossary[type=acronym]

\end{document}