Acronyms

This Lua filter allows to define and use acronyms in a document.

Note

This is work in progress and some details may still change. Feedback is welcome!

See sample.md for an example and usage notes.

Usage

Acronyms should be defined in the acronyms part of the document metadata. E.g.:

acronyms:
  html:
    short: HTML
    long: Hypertext Markup Language
  css:
    short: CSS
    long: Cascading Style Sheets
  amphetamine: alpha-methylphenethylamine

The acronyms can then be used by referencing an acronym id in a span with class acro:

Webpages are styled with [css]{.acro}

Pandoc 3.0 and later added support for wikilinks in Markdown; enabling the respective extension allows to use wikilink syntax for acronyms.

This page uses [[html]] and [[css]].

Capitalize the acronym ID to uppercase the first letter of the replacement text: [Amphetamine]{.acro} will produce Alpha-methylphenethylamine.

Placing the list of acronyms

The list of acronyms will be placed in the div with id acronym-defs if any such div is part of the document.

## Acronyms

The following acronyms are used in this thesis:

::: {#acronym-defs}
:::

Setup

The filter modifies the internal document representation; it can be used with many publishing systems that are based on pandoc.

Plain pandoc

Pass the filter to pandoc via the --lua-filter (or -L) command line option.

pandoc --lua-filter acronyms.lua ...

Quarto

The filter must be used as a plain Lua filter; it's not (yet) possible to install the filter as an extension. Download the file acronyms.lua to your project directory and add list it in the filters section of the YAML frontmatter.

---
filters:
  - acronyms.lua
---

R Markdown

Use pandoc_args to invoke the filter. See the R Markdown Cookbook for details.

---
output:
  word_document:
    pandoc_args: ['--lua-filter=acronyms.lua']
---

Dedication

For Sarah and Lukas, who got the ball rolling.

License

This work is licensed under the MIT license. See file LICENSE for details.