MadCap Software Forums

Hi madcaps,

Is it possible to add columns to a glossary. I am thinking that it may be useful to have an abbreviation column and also is there a way to handle synonyms?

Thank you........................liz

I don't believe that the glossary editor is designed to do either.

The way I handle synonyms is that, either in the definition of the term as entered right in the glossary editor, or in a topic holding the definition to which I point the term, I write something like "Also referred to as blah blah". Or I'll include something like "See blah blah".

But as far as I know, there is no automated way to provide synonyms for glossary terms, the way one can provide synonyms for index terms, and there is no way to add an extra column to the glossary editor.

Hey Nita,

Revisiting this old topic, I was wondering whether Flare now has a way to link those 'see also' items you may want to include in a glossary term definition? Otherwise, how do the users navigate to the definition of the 'see also' term?

Thanks, Louise.

Louise, what is your target type? Are we talking about an online output glossary, or are we talking about PDF?

Also, even though the question is several years old, I wanted to answer the OP question about columns, in case somebody comes across this question later and is looking for an answer. If you want columns in PDF glossary output, what you do is create a new page layout. You can either have one body element and set, in the properties, the number of columns you want, or you can actually create multiple body elements and then you control the flow of how the content will flow from one body element to the other. So there are two different ways to do that from the page layout screen. Then you set the page layout on the TOC item. We use two-column page layouts for our glossary and index pages.