Unused glossary terms

[Bfdonnelly]

My apologies if this is out-of-line, but I've checked both this forum and the help. Maybe it's covered somewhere I couldn't find, but I thought I would ask before bothering the tech support. (I'm evaluating.)

Indexes are generated at least partly by compiling the index entries in the files under a TOC, so if I remove a topic, the index doesn't build with the index entries tagged there. That's pretty great!

However, what if I don't use glossary terms? One of the problems I'm trying to solve is to do with ensuring I don't define any terms I don't use. In the nightmare production problem that prompted me to try Flare, I had to search for the text, including different tenses and plurals, for every one of 30-odd pages of glossary definitions. This took three tedious days.

So I would very much like to be able to compile a glossary without unused items. Failing that, I'd like to be able to find them in analyzer and remove them manually (a distant second-best option).

Looking at help & tutorials, I haven't found this issue addressed, although the opposite issue -- undefined glossary terms -- is.

Am I missing something? Does the typical workflow simply not consider this?

Note, I am looking at an application that would require certain terms in some conditions, but not in others.

Thanks for your help.

[Bfdonnelly]

I broke down and called. There is no helpful mechanism, except using more than one glossary. If more than one glossary uses the same term, though, it seems I get duplicates -- so that strategy requires multiple glossaries -- essentially if you have overlaps between what would be two glossaries you really need three, to include the overlap. If you would have three glossaries, you need up to 7 glossaries for the overlaps, 13 for 4, etc.

[kelly1210]

I have asked several times (through enhancement requests) for them to add CONDITION tags to glossary items. This would solve your problem, I believe. I was disappointed to see my request was not added in Flare 11. Please submit an enhancement for adding condition tags to Glossary items, if you feel like this would solve your problem OR be a good thing to have. I will enter another one also.

[Bfdonnelly]

Yes, thank you, I did. Also some other things, including enhancements to Analyzer.

I gather the problem is that an enhancement to Flare has to be shoehorned into XHTML.

To recap, I like the way that indexes pick up and collate the index entries in each file. This could work with a glossary, if the definitions were located alongside each glossary marker in the file. Unfortunately, that would likely lead to duplicates, and might lengthen the time to compile a target unreasonably. A more sensible option would be to keep the XHTML architecture as-is, but compile a list of the markers, a list of the glossary terms and do one of two things according to a setting for each target: (1) build the glossary including the unused terms or (2) omit the unused terms. This should be the default. There might be a case in which certain terms could be defined even if not used, so that option should be present -- but not the default. From the user perspective the difference would be an additional checkbox saying "Send unused terms defined in the glossary to the target."

Something similar could fix a similar problem with concepts.

So far, I'm pretty impressed with Flare, but it seems to require some refactoring.

[NorthEast]

Until Flare has this sort of functionality, if you need to find what glossary terms are used (without going mad in the process), then you can generate reports on Files with Glossary Term Links and Used Glossary Term Links. Unfortunately though, reports are for the whole project, rather than per target.

[Bfdonnelly]

Per-target is actually what I want, because then I can make sure I've assigned terms correctly to the proper glossaries.

However, the application I'm looking at will require a large number of conditional outputs.

Madcap could write Analyzer to generate and compare the reports, and offer the option to send the terms to different glossaries -- including a new glossary.