Glossaries

Understand glossaries in Adobe FrameMaker. Learn how to create a glossary marker with a term definition and how to apply the glossary marker to the occurrences of the term.

In this topic

Introduction

In Adobe FrameMaker, you can define glossary terms using markers. You can then publish a document that contains the glossary of the defined terms. In the published output, if a user encounters a glossary term, the user can find the definition.

To publish output that contains a glossary of terms, you need to create the glossary term definition and apply the glossary marker to the occurences of the term.

Create the glossary term definition

In your document, you need to provide definitions for the terms that you plan to include in the glossary.

  1. In the document, place the pointer in the paragraph containing the definition of the term.

    For example, you can define the term PDF as Portable Document Format. In this case, you need to place the pointer in the paragraph containing the definition of Portable Document Format in the document.

  2. Choose Insert > Marker to open the Marker dialog. In the Marker dialog, select the marker type as Glossary.

  3. Specify the marker text as the term.

Note: When you apply the glossary marker, you can view the complete glossary definition, which can be a sentence or even a paragraph, in the left panel of the HTML output.

Apply the glossary marker to the occurrences of the term

The glossary term is defined. Next, you need to apply this definition to occurrences of the term in the document.

  1. Select the term to which you want to apply the glossary definition. In the published output, if a user selects this term, the user is presented with the definition.

    For example, if the document contains the term PDF, you need to select the text PDF.

  2. Choose Insert > Marker to open the Marker dialog. In the Marker dialog, select the marker type as GlossaryTerm.

  3. Specify the marker text as the term.

    By default, FrameMaker displays the marker text as the text selected in the previous step.

Note: It is not necessary to specify the marker text as the term. However, you need to ensure that the marker text that you specify is the same as the first word in marker text defined when you create the glossary term definition.

When you publish the document, you can specify how to display the glossary definition when a user selects a term in a document. For details, see the General Settings options in the Style mapping table of the Publish Options.