Better glossaries

[Nathan-Furnal]

Hi,

This is both a question and a somewhat helpful post. I had to use glossaries recently and when I tried the minimal example from the manual, it didn't work as makeglossaries was not ran in the shell.

This can easily be fixed by creating an ~/.latexmkrc file (on Linux) and write to it:

add_cus_dep('glo', 'gls', 0, 'run_makeglossaries');
add_cus_dep('acn', 'acr', 0, 'run_makeglossaries');

sub run_makeglossaries {
  if ( $silent ) {
    system "makeglossaries -q '$_[0]'";
  }
  else {
    system "makeglossaries '$_[0]'";
  };
}

and it'll be running smoothly, this is explained here.

My question the following : how do I get large latex_header_extra blocks to write glossary entries? It's a real pain to write multi-line headers and I wondered in there was a better way?

Thanks for the excellent package

[jkitchin]

I manage this in a custom make pdf function defined at https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/blob/master/ox-manuscript/ox-manuscript.el#L435.

You could consider using #INCLUDE: files to put them in another file. I haven't tried that in a while. I am sure it is a pain to use latex_header_extra though. I don't know how easy it is to include a texfile in the right place though.

[Nathan-Furnal]

Thanks for the function, I'll look into ox-manuscript, I'm satisfied with the .latexmkrc solution for the most part though.

I've been trying to use org-mode macros to simplify using the headers, such as
this snippet in my init.el.

  (setq org-export-global-macros
	'(("glossentry" . "#+latex_header_extra: \\newglossaryentry{$1}{name=$2, description={$3}}")))

So with

#+latex_header: \usepackage{glossaries}
#+latex_header: \makeglossaries
{{{glossentry(comp, computer, A machine of immense mysteries)}}}

* Introduction

We present a method to uncover the hidden world of the gls:comp. 

\printglossaries

We should get something decent, possibly multi-line as long as the macro encompasses the description part of the glossary entry.

For some reason this doesn't always work, I could reproduce the example in the doc with this method but a long description tripped up LaTeX, I don't know if it's because of line wrapping or because I had commas in the description, which have to be escaped because macros use commas to separate arguments.

Thanks for the help!

[jkitchin]

You can now use #+latex_header: \loadglsentries[main]{glossary} (see https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/master/org-ref.org#glossaries-and-acronyms). This should work with the tooltips, although I haven't tested it super thoroughly with long multiline definitions.

[Nathan-Furnal]

Inserting them in the table at the top works great, thanks!

[mcraveiro]

Thanks very much for org-ref, an amazing tool which I rely upon daily. I'd like to add a somewhat related comment to this discussion. Hopefully, it will preserve the sanity of any further reader who, like myself, tries to combine classic thesis [1] with org-ref. If, after the suggestions above, your makeglossaries fails with an error such as this one:

(./chapter_2.acr [9] [10]
! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> \letcs {\glo@name 
                             }{glo@\glsdetoklabel {acmdsd}@name}\expandafter...
l.5 ...etentrycounter[]{page}\glsnumberformat{3}}}
                                                  %

Then your probably hit the same bug as me. The problem is on an obscure combination of classic thesis with glossary as per this SO question [2]. I personally solved it by adding the following (nolist being the important option):

#+latex_header: \usepackage[acronym,nomain,nolist]{glossaries}

I do not claim this to be the best solution. The SO question provides a lot of detail, which is probably meaningful to someone who actually knows LaTeX. But this would at least allow you to get on with your life.

[1] ClassicThesis – A “classically styled” thesis package
[2] Glossaries: error when compiling