Bibliography

[nielsf]

Hi,
Does any of you have any clever ideas for creating a bibliography - a project-wide list of textual references?
Something tells me "Gloassary" - but has anyone used a glossary in this way?
Thanks,
Niels

[roboHAL]

Hi Niels. I can offer an "idea"... never actually needed to create a reference per se, however, I do annotate a number of topics and specific text within it with such information as who in my organization approved it or otherwise vouches for the accuracy. That works well for me the help author but of course users do not see that.

In your case, seeing that you do want users to see this kind of information, a glossary may be one way to go. However, it seems to me the essence of what you are looking to do is simply have one or more keywords that appear in a topic refer to something else such as their definition and/or a list of sources.

If you create a topic for each keyword, I think this would give you the most flexibility. For one, you can decide whether or not to make the topic searchable or not. Second, you can create an index keyword in each of the topics that can be used in an Index so the user can view all of the items where a reference exists (if you want to show all keywords). Also, when you choose to hyperlink the keyword within the topic in which it appears, you can code the hyperlink to open in a pop-up. The hyperlink and/or pop-up can be styled, sized, etc. to create a degree of elegance (my opinion) or certainly a differentiator among other hyperlinks where there is no reference/bibliography so again users have a visual clue that the term is associated with some kind of reference.

Just my .02....

[ChoccieMuffin]

Would footnotes work for you? When you insert a footnote you can define where the footnote text appears: end of page, topic, section or chapter. You can also insert an Endnotes proxy, so I suspect you may be able to include a complete list of all your footnotes in one place. Haven't had to do it myself, so take a look and have a play.