Glossary Lists

Once you’ve developed the glossary entries, you may want to present them as a generated list for easy browsing.

The assumed use for this list is as an additional “TOC” list at the beginning of the book. This would be presented as a list of terms that link to the full glossary topics (glossentries). With DITA-FMx, we can leverage FrameMaker’s ability to create multiple types of generated lists, and a glossary list is just one of those types.

The following steps describe one way to achieve this list.

  1. We assume that you’re using a bookmap, and in the frontmatter booklists element you should insert an emptyglossarylist element.

  2. Next, set up a “gentpl” component template to properly format that generated list (like a TOC or Index). You might start by cloning the gentpl~toc.fm file to gentpl~glossarylist.fm.

  3. In your bookbuild INI, you need to provide the para tag names for “GeneratedFile-glossarylist” like you do for the TOC.

  4. Not required, but a good practice would be to separate your glossentry topics into a separate submap that has a single root element so they all show up as child nodes of the root.

    <map>
    <title>Glossary</title>
    <topicref href="glossmain.xml">
    <glossref href="glossentryone.xml"/>
    <glossref href="glossentrytwo.xml"/>
    <glossref href="glossentrythree.xml"/>
    ...
    </topicref>
    </map>
  5. In your template, make sure the glossterm (titles) get tagged with some unique para tag, so you can use that in step #3 (above).