The Quickest Glosssary Ever

Top  Previous  Next

  Okay, this admittedly is a hyperbolic name. The other techniques may in fact be easier and faster for you. The purpose of this page and the exercise it describes really is to demonstrate that there is nothing 'magical' about glossaries.

  And there are circumstances where this indeed is the best approach.

  Take an existing document. It should be a document that contains more or less 'standard' clauses that you want to convert to individual glossary terms.

  Rename the document (using your SaveAs function) so that the document's name ends with the word "Glossary" (no quotes, and the case doesn't matter). With that simple document name change, you have created a Pathagoras glossary.

  Now, of course, the glossary has no terms in it. But adding them is easy.

  Highlight that portion of the text that you want to become your first glossary term. It can be a paragraph, several paragraphs, whatever. Press <Alt-G> against the highlighted text. The TermWorks screen will appear. You will see two boxes in the TermWorks screen for you to provide a Name and a Subject for this term. You must use a 'legal' bookmark name for the term's Name. A legal bookmark name is a single work that begins with a letter and contains no 'special' characters such as '$', '%', '#', '@' etc. An underscore between words (like this: "Intake_Form") is fine.

tipWe recommend that you name the term following the prefix/suffix naming style. That will help you to sort the order of the clauses in the Clause Selection and/or DropDown Lists with more precision. ('Names' of documents rarely fall in alpha-numeric order, do they?) Use the 'Subject' field to better describe the term. Subjects can easily be displayed, while the order of the names are preserved, but 'hidden' behind the scenes.

  After you have given the term a Name and a Subject, press Green bar that says "This Glossary" and the glossary term will be created. (This creation is simply (1) Adding the Name in red text and the Subject in blue text immediately above the highlighted text, and then (2) surrounding the highlighted text with bookmarks. That is all that constitutes a glossary term in the first place.

 Keep on highlighting, <Alt-G>ing, naming and saving. You will have a complete glossary in no time.