Abstract
The glossaries package provides a means to define terms or acronyms or symbols that can be referenced within your document. Sorted lists with collated locations can be generated using a supplementary indexing application.
😱 If you’re freaking out at the size of this manual, start with glossariesbegin.pdf (“The glossaries package: a guide for beginnners”). You should find it in the same directory as this document or try texdoc glossariesbegin.pdf. Once you’ve got to grips with the basics, then come back to this manual to find out how to adjust the settings.
The glossaries bundle comes with the following documentation:
If you are using hyperref, it’s best to use pdflatex rather than latex (DVI format) as pdflatex deals with hyperlinks much better. If you use the DVI format, you will encounter problems where you have long hyperlinks or hyperlinks in subscripts or superscripts. This is an issue with the DVI format not with glossaries.
Other documents that describe using the glossaries package include: Using LaTeX to Write a PhD Thesis and Glossaries, Nomenclature, Lists of Symbols and Acronyms.
| \usepackage[ | xindy, |
| nonumberlist, |
| toc, |
| nopostdot, |
| style=altlist, |
| nogroupskip]{glossaries} |
\glsnoexpandfields
\renewcommand*{\glsseeformat}[3][\seename]{%
(\xmakefirstuc{#1} \glsseelist{#2}.)}
Earlier versions of glossaries used this technique to write information to
the files used by the indexing applications to prevent problems caused by
fragile commands. Now, this is only used for the sort key.
The glossaries package is provided to assist generating lists of terms, symbols or abbreviations (glossaries). It has a certain amount of flexibility, allowing the user to customize the format of the glossary and define multiple glossaries. It also supports glossary styles that include symbols (in addition to a name and description) for glossary entries. There is provision for loading a database of glossary terms. Only those terms used1.1 in the document will be added to the glossary.
This package replaces the glossary package which is now obsolete. Please see the document “Upgrading from the glossary package to the glossaries package” for assistance in upgrading.
One of the strengths of this package is its flexibility, however the drawback of this is the necessity of having a large manual that can cover all the various settings. If you are daunted by the size of the manual, try starting off with the much shorter guide for beginners.
The basic idea behind the glossaries package is that you first define your entries (terms, symbols or abbreviations). Then you can reference these within your document (like \cite or \ref). You can also, optionally, display a list of the entries you have referenced in your document (the glossary). This last part, displaying the glossary is the part that most new users find difficult. There are three options:
This is the simplest option but it’s slow and if you want a sorted list, it doesn’t work well for extended Latin alphabets or non-Latin alphabets. However, if you use the sanitizesort=false package option (the default for Option 1) then the standard LATEX accent commands will be ignored, so if an entry’s name is set to {\’e}lite then the sort will default to elite if sanitizesort=false is used and will default to \’elite if sanitizesort=true is used.
where you want your list of entries to appear (described in §10 Displaying a glossary).
This option uses a command line interface (CLI) application called makeindex to sort the entries. This application comes with all modern TEX distributions, but it’s hard-coded for the non-extended Latin alphabet, so it doesn’t work well for extended Latin alphabets or non-Latin alphabets. This process involves making LATEX write the glossary information to a temporary file which makeindex reads. Then makeindex writes a new file containing the code to typeset the glossary. LATEX then reads this file in on the next run.
where you want your list of entries to appear (described in §10 Displaying a glossary).
(Replace myDoc with the base name of your LATEX document file. Avoid spaces in the file name.) If you don’t know how to use the command prompt, then you can probably access makeindex via your text editor, but each editor has a different method of doing this, so I can’t give a general description. You will have to check your editor’s manual.
The default sort is word order (“sea lion” comes before “seal”). If you want letter ordering you need to add the -l switch:
(See §1.3.3 Using makeindex explicitly (Option 2) for further details on using makeindex explicitly.)
This is the default option (although you still need to use \makeglossaries to ensure the glossary files are created).
This option uses a CLI application called xindy to sort the entries. This application is more flexible than makeindex and is able to sort extended Latin alphabets or non-Latin alphabets. The xindy application comes with TEX Live but not with MiKTEX. Since xindy is a Perl script, if you are using MiKTEX you will not only need to install xindy, you will also need to install Perl. In a similar way to Option 2, this option involves making LATEX write the glossary information to a temporary file which xindy reads. Then xindy writes a new file containing the code to typeset the glossary. LATEX then reads this file in on the next run.
(Replace myDoc with the base name of your LATEX document file. Avoid spaces in the file name. If necessary, also replace english with the name of your language and utf8 with your input encoding.) If you don’t know how to use the command prompt, then you can probably access xindy via your text editor, but each editor has a different method of doing this, so I can’t give a general description. You will have to check your editor’s manual.
The default sort is word order (“sea lion” comes before “seal”). If you want letter ordering you need to add the order=letter package option:
(See §1.3.2 Using xindy explicitly (Option 3) for further details on using xindy explicitly.)
For Options 2 and 3, it can be difficult to remember all the parameters required for makeindex or xindy, so the glossaries package provides a script called makeglossaries that reads the .aux file to determine what settings you have used and will then run makeindex or xindy. Again, this is a command line application and can be run in a terminal or command prompt. For example, if your LATEX document is in the file myDoc.tex, then run:
(Replace myDoc with the base name of your LATEX document file. Avoid spaces in the file name.) This is described in more detail in §1.3 Generating the Associated Glossary Files.
An overview of these three options is given in table 1.1.
|
| Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 |
| Requires an external application? | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Requires Perl? | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Can sort extended Latin alphabets or non-Latin alphabets? | ✘† | ✘ | ✔ |
| Efficient sort algorithm? | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Can use a different sort algorithm for each glossary? | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Can form ranges in the location lists? | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Can have non-standard locations in the location lists? | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Maximum hierarchical depth | Unlimited | 3 | Unlimited |
| ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | |
| ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | |
| Requires additional write registers? | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| false | true | true |
† Strips standard LATEX accents (that is, accents generated by core LATEX commands) so, for example, \AA is treated the same as A.
This document uses the glossaries package. For example, when viewing the PDF version of this document in a hyperlinked-enabled PDF viewer (such as Adobe Reader or Okular) if you click on the word “xindy” you’ll be taken to the entry in the glossary where there’s a brief description of the term “xindy”.
The remainder of this introductory section covers the following:
The glossaries package is provided with some sample documents that illustrate the
various functions. These should be located in the samples subdirectory (folder) of the
glossaries documentation directory. This location varies according to your
operating system and TEX distribution. You can use texdoc to locate the main
glossaries documentation. For example, in a terminal or command prompt, type:
texdoc -l glossaries
If you can’t find the sample files on your computer, they are also available from your nearest CTAN mirror at http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/glossaries/samples/.
The sample documents are as follows1.2:
These warnings may be ignored on the first run.
If you get a Missing \begin{document} error, then it’s most likely that your version of xkeyval is out of date. Check the log file for a warning of that nature. If this is the case, you will need to update the xkeyval package.
perl makeglossaries minimalgls
makeindex -s minimalgls.ist -t minimalgls.glg -o minimalgls.gls
minimalgls.glo
Note that if you need to specify the full path and the path contains spaces, you will need to delimit the file names with the double-quote character.
You should now have a complete document. The number following each entry in the glossary is the location number. By default, this is the page number where the entry was referenced.
it will set the style file to samplexdy-mc.xdy instead. This provides an additional letter group for entries starting with “Mc” or “Mac”. If you use makeglossaries, you don’t need to supply any additional information. If you don’t use makeglossaries, you will need to specify the required information. Note that if you set the style file to samplexdy-mc.xdy you must also specify \noist, otherwise the glossaries package will overwrite samplexdy-mc.xdy and you will lose the “Mc” letter group.
To create the document do:
latex samplexdy
makeglossaries samplexdy
latex samplexdy
xindy -L english -C utf8 -I xindy -M samplexdy -t samplexdy.glg -o
samplexdy.gls samplexdy.glo
xindy -I xindy -M samplexdy-mc -t samplexdy.glg -o samplexdy.gls
samplexdy.glo
xindy -L english -C utf8 -I xindy -M samplexdy2 -t samplexdy2.glg
-o samplexdy2.gls samplexdy2.glo
xindy -L english -C utf8 -I xindy -M sampleutf8 -t sampleutf8.glg
-o sampleutf8.gls sampleutf8.glo
If you remove the xindy option from sampleutf8.tex and do:
latex sampleutf8
makeglossaries sampleutf8
latex sampleutf8
makeindex -s sampleutf8.ist -t sampleutf8.glg -o sampleutf8.gls
sampleutf8.glo
As from version 1.17, the glossaries package can now be used with xindy as well as makeindex. If you are writing in a language that uses an extended Latin alphabet or non-Latin alphabet it is recommended that you use xindy as makeindex is hard-coded for the non-extended Latin alphabet. This means that you are not restricted to the A, …, Z letter groups. If you want to use xindy, remember to use the xindy package option. For example:
If you use a non-Latin character (or other expandable) character at the start of an entry name, you must place it in a group, or it will cause a problem for commands that convert the first letter to upper case (e.g. \Gls) due to expansion issues. For example:
If you use the inputenc package, makeglossaries will pick up the encoding from the auxiliary file. If you use xindy explicitly instead of via makeglossaries, you may need to specify the encoding using the -C option. Read the xindy manual for further details.
As from version 1.08, the glossaries package now has limited multi-lingual support, thanks to all the people who have sent me the relevant translations either via email or via comp.text.tex. However you must load babel or polyglossia before glossaries to enable this. Note that if babel is loaded and the translator package is detected on TEX’s path, then the translator package will be loaded automatically, unless you use the translate=false or translate=babel package options. However, it may not pick up on the required languages so, if the predefined text is not translated, you may need to explicitly load the translator package with the required languages. For example:
Alternatively, specify the language as a class option rather than a package option. For example:
If you want to use ngerman or german instead of babel, you will need to include the translator package to provide the translations. For example:
The languages are currently supported by the glossaries package are listed in table 1.2. Please note that (apart from spelling mistakes) I don’t intend to change the default translations as it will cause compatibility problems.
If you want to add a language not currently supported, you can post the contents of your .dict file on my feature request form at http://www.dickimaw-_books.com/feature-_request.html. Please use LATEX commands for non-Latin characters as the file must be independent of the input encoding otherwise it won’t be of any use to people who use a different encoding to yourself.
| Language | As from version |
| Brazilian Portuguese | 1.17 |
| Danish | 1.08 |
| Dutch | 1.08 |
| English | 1.08 |
| French | 1.08 |
| German | 1.08 |
| Irish | 1.08 |
| Italian | 1.08 |
| Hungarian | 1.08 |
| Polish | 1.13 |
| Serbian | 2.06 |
| Spanish | 1.08 |
The language dependent commands and translator keys used by the glossaries package are listed in table 1.3.
Due to the varied nature of glossaries, it’s likely that the predefined translations may not be appropriate. If you are using the babel package and the glossaries package option translate=babel, you need to be familiar with the advice given in changing the words babel uses. If you are using the translator package, then you can provide your own dictionary with the necessary modifications (using \deftranslation) and load it using \usedictionary.
Your custom dictionary doesn’t have to be just a translation from English to another language. You may prefer to have a dictionary for a particular type of document. For example, suppose your institution’s in-house reports have to have the glossary labelled as “Nomenclature” and the page list should be labelled “Location”, then you can create a file called, say,
that contains the following:
You can now load it using:
(Make sure that myinstitute-glossaries-dictionary-English.dict can be found by TEX.) If you want to share your custom dictionary, you can upload it to CTAN.
If you are using babel and don’t want to use the translator interface, you can use the package option translate=babel. For example:
If you are using polyglossia instead of babel, glossaries-polyglossia will automatically be loaded unless you specify the package option translate=false.
Note that xindy provides much better multi-lingual support than makeindex, so it’s recommended that you use xindy if you have glossary entries that contain non-Latin characters. See §11 Xindy (Option 3) for further details.
In order to generate a sorted glossary with compact number lists, it is necessary to use an external indexing application as an intermediate step (unless you have chosen Option 1). It is this application that creates the file containing the code that typesets the glossary. If this step is omitted, the glossaries will not appear in your document. The two indexing applications that are most commonly used with LATEX are makeindex and xindy. As from version 1.17, the glossaries package can be used with either of these applications. Previous versions were designed to be used with makeindex only. Note that xindy has much better multi-lingual support than makeindex, so xindy is recommended if you’re not writing in English. Commands that only have an effect when xindy is used are described in §11 Xindy (Option 3).
The glossaries package comes with the Perl script makeglossaries which will run makeindex or xindy on all the glossary files using a customized style file (which is created by \makeglossaries). See §1.3.1 Using the makeglossaries Perl Script for further details. Perl is stable, cross-platform, open source software that is used by a number of TEX-related applications. Most Unix-like operating systems come with a Perl interpreter. TEX Live also comes with a Perl interpreter. MiKTEX doesn’t come with a Perl interpreter so if you are a Windows MiKTEX user you will need to install Perl if you want to use makeglossaries. Further information is available at http://www.perl.org/about.html and MiKTeX and Perl scripts (and one Python script).
The advantages of using makeglossaries:
There is also a Java GUI alternative called makeglossariesgui, distributed separately, that has diagnostic tools.
Whilst it is strongly recommended that you use the makeglossaries script or makeglossariesgui, it is possible to use the glossaries package without using either application. However, note that some commands and package options have no effect if you don’t use makeglossaries or makeglossariesgui. These are listed in table 1.4.
Note that if any of your entries use an entry that is not referenced outside the glossary, you will need to do an additional makeglossaries, makeindex or xindy run, as appropriate. For example, suppose you have defined the following entries:1.3
and suppose you have \gls{citrusfruit} in your document but don’t reference the
orange entry, then the orange entry won’t appear in your glossary until you first
create the glossary and then do another run of makeglossaries, makeindex or
xindy. For example, if the document is called myDoc.tex, then you must do:
latex myDoc
makeglossaries myDoc
latex myDoc
makeglossaries myDoc
latex myDoc
Likewise, an additional makeglossaries and LATEX run may be required if the document pages shift with re-runs. For example, if the page numbering is not reset after the table of contents, the insertion of the table of contents on the second LATEX run may push glossary entries across page boundaries, which means that the number lists in the glossary may need updating.
The examples in this document assume that you are accessing makeglossaries, xindy or makeindex via a terminal. Windows users can use the MSDOS Prompt which is usually accessed via the Start->All Programs menu or Start->All Programs->Accessories menu.
Alternatively, your text editor may have the facility to create a function that will call the required application. The article “Glossaries, Nomenclature, List of Symbols and Acronyms” in the LATEX Community’s Know How section describes how to do this for TeXnicCenter, and the thread “Executing Glossaries’ makeindex from a WinEdt macro” on the comp.text.tex newsgroup describes how to do it for WinEdt. Section 1.1 (Building Your Document) of “Using LATEX to Write a PhD Thesis” describes how to do it for TeXWorks. For other editors see the editor’s user manual for further details.
If any problems occur, remember to check the transcript files (e.g. .glg or .alg) for messages.
The makeglossaries script picks up the relevant information from the auxiliary
(.aux) file and will either call xindy or makeindex, depending on the supplied
information. Therefore, you only need to pass the document’s name without the
extension to makeglossaries. For example, if your document is called myDoc.tex,
type the following in your terminal:
latex myDoc
makeglossaries myDoc
latex myDoc
perl makeglossaries myDoc
Windows users: TeX Live on Windows has its own internal Perl interpreter and provides makeglossaries.exe as a convenient wrapper for the makeglossaries Perl script. MiKTeX also provides a wrapper makeglossaries.exe but doesn’t provide a Perl interpreter, which is still required even if you run MiKTeX’s makeglossaries.exe, so with MiKTeX you’ll need to install Perl. There’s more information about this at http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/158796/19862 on the TeX.SX site. Alternatively, there is a batch file called makeglossaries.bat that should be located in the same folder as the makeglossaries Perl script. This just explicitly loads the script into Perl. If you’ve installed Perl but for some reason your operating system can’t find perl.exe, you can edit the makeglossaries.bat file to include the full path to perl.exe (but take care as this file will be overwritten next time you update the glossaries package). If you move the .bat file to a new location, you will also need to supply the full path to the makeglossaries Perl script. (Don’t also move the Perl script as well or you may miss out on updates to makeglossaries.)
The makeglossaries script attempts to fork the makeindex/xindy process using open() on the piped redirection 2>&1 | and parses the processor output to help diagnose problems. If this method fails makeglossaries will print an “Unable to fork” warning and will retry without redirection. If you run makeglossaries on an operating system that doesn’t support this form of redirection, then you can use the -Q switch to suppress this warning or you can use the -k switch to make makeglossaries automatically use the fallback method without attempting the redirection. Without this redirection, the -q (quiet) switch doesn’t work as well.
You can specify in which directory the .aux, .glo etc files are located using the -d
switch. For example:
pdflatex -output-directory myTmpDir myDoc
makeglossaries -d myTmpDir myDoc
The makeglossaries script contains POD (Plain Old Documentation). If you want, you can create a man page for makeglossaries using pod2man and move the resulting file onto the man path. Alternatively do makeglossaries --help for a list of all options or makeglossaries --version for the version number.
Xindy comes with TEX Live, but not with MiKTEX. However MikTEX users can install it. See How to use Xindy with MikTeX on TEX on StackExchange.
If you want to use xindy to process the glossary files, you must make sure you have used the xindy package option:
This is required regardless of whether you use xindy explicitly or whether it’s called implicitly via applications such as makeglossaries or makeglossariesgui. This causes the glossary entries to be written in raw xindy format, so you need to use -I xindy not -I tex.
To run xindy type the following in your terminal (all on one line):
xindy -L <language> -C <encoding> -I xindy -M <style> -t
<base>.glg -o <base>.gls <base>.glo
For example, if your document is called myDoc.tex and you are using UTF8
encoding in English, then type the following in your terminal:
xindy -L english -C utf8 -I xindy -M myDoc -t myDoc.glg -o myDoc.gls
myDoc.glo
Note that this just creates the main glossary. You need to do the same for each of
the other glossaries (including the list of acronyms if you have used the acronym
package option), substituting .glg, .gls and .glo with the relevant extensions. For
example, if you have used the acronym package option, then you would need to do:
xindy -L english -C utf8 -I xindy -M myDoc -t myDoc.alg -o myDoc.acr
myDoc.acn
Note that if you use makeglossaries instead, you can replace all those calls to
xindy with just one call to makeglossaries:
makeglossaries myDoc
If you want to use makeindex explicitly, you must make sure that you haven’t used
the xindy package option or the glossary entries will be written in the wrong format.
To run makeindex, type the following in your terminal:
makeindex -s <style>.ist -t <base>.glg -o <base>.gls <base>.glo
For example, if your document is called myDoc.tex, then type the following at the
terminal:
makeindex -s myDoc.ist -t myDoc.glg -o myDoc.gls myDoc.glo
makeindex -s myDoc.ist -t myDoc.alg -o myDoc.acr myDoc.acn
Note that if you use makeglossaries instead, you can replace all those calls to
makeindex with just one call to makeglossaries:
makeglossaries myDoc
The information needed to determine whether to use xindy or makeindex and the information needed to call those applications is stored in the auxiliary file. This information can be gathered by a front-end, editor or script to make the glossaries where appropriate. This section describes how the information is stored in the auxiliary file.
The file extensions used by each defined glossary are given by
where <in-ext> is the extension of the indexing application’s input file (the output file from the glossaries package’s point of view), <out-ext> is the extension of the indexing application’s output file (the input file from the glossaries package’s point of view) and <log> is the extension of the indexing application’s transcript file. The label for the glossary is also given for information purposes only, but is not required by the indexing applications. For example, the information for the default main glossary is written as:
The indexing application’s style file is specified by
The file extension indicates whether to use makeindex (.ist) or xindy (.xdy). Note that the glossary information is formatted differently depending on which indexing application is supposed to be used, so it’s important to call the correct one.
Word or letter ordering is specified by:
where <order> can be either word or letter.
If xindy should be used, the language and code page for each glossary is specified by
where <label> identifies the glossary, <language> is the root language (e.g. english) and <code> is the encoding (e.g. utf8). These commands are omitted if makeindex should be used.
If Option 1 has been used, the .aux file will contain
for every time an entry has been referenced.
This section describes the available glossaries package options. You may omit the =true for boolean options. (For example, acronym is equivalent to acronym=true).
The sort value (#) must be sanitized before writing it to the glossary file, otherwise LATEX will try to interpret it as a parameter reference. If, on the other hand, you want the sort value expanded, you need to switch off the sanitization. For example, suppose you do:
and you actually want \mysortvalue expanded, so that the entry is sorted according to AAA, then use the package option sanitizesort=false.
The default for Options 2 and 3 is sanitizesort=true, and the default for Option 1 is sanitizesort=false.
You can also reduce the number of write registers by using Option 1 or by ensuring you define all your glossary entries in the preamble.
If translate is specified without a value, translate=true is assumed. If translate isn’t specified, translate=true is assumed if babel, polyglossia or translator have been loaded. Otherwise translate=false is assumed.
See §1.2.1 Changing the Fixed Names for further details.
The values must be fully expanded, so don’t try nohypertypes=\acronymtype. You may also use
instead or additionally. See §6 Links to Glossary Entries for further details.
and
You can omit the value if you want to use sections, i.e.
is equivalent to
You can change this value later in the document using
where <name> is the sectional unit.
The start of each glossary adds information to the page header via
By default this uses<EMAIL_ADDRESS>but you may need to redefine it. For example, to only change the right header:
or to prevent it from changing the headers:
If you want \glsglossarymark to use \MakeUppercase in the header, use the ucmark option described below.
Occasionally you may find that another package defines \cleardoublepage when it is not required. This may cause an unwanted blank page to appear before each glossary. This can be fixed by redefining \glsclearpage \glsclearpage:
For example:
If memoir has been loaded and ucfirst is set, then memoir’s \memUChead is used.
where <type> is the label identifying that glossary. The default value of \glsautoprefix is empty. For example, if you load glossaries using:
then each glossary will appear in a numbered section, and can be referenced using something like:
If you can’t decide whether to have the acronyms in the main glossary or a separate list of acronyms, you can use \acronymtype which is set to main if the acronym option is not used and is set to acronym if the acronym option is used. For example:
You can redefine the prefix if the default label clashes with another label in your document. For example:
will add glo: to the automatically generated label, so you can then, for example, refer to the list of acronyms as follows:
Or, if you are undecided on a prefix:
Now \nameref{main} will display the (TOC) section title associated with the main glossary. As above, you can redefine \glsautoprefix to provide a prefix for the label.
If you use this option, you can reference the entry number within the document using
where <label> is the label associated with that glossary entry.
If you want the counter reset at the start of each glossary, you can redefine \glossarypreamble to use
which sets glossaryentry to zero:
or if you are using \setglossarypreamble, add it to each glossary preamble, as required. For example:
(See §15 Glossary Styles for further details.)
This is a <key>=<value> option where <value> may be one of the following:
Both sort=def and sort=use set the sort key to a six digit number via
(padded with leading zeros, where necessary). This can be redefined, if required, before the entries are defined (in the case of sort=def) or before the entries are used (in the case of sort=use).
The default is sort=standard. When the standard sort option is in use, you can hook into the sort mechanism by redefining:
where <sort cs> is a temporary control sequence that stores the sort value (which was either explicitly set via the sort key or implicitly set via the name key) before any escaping of the makeindex/xindy special characters is performed. By default \glsprestandardsort just does:
which sanitizes <sort cs> if the sanitizesort package option is set (or does nothing if the package option sanitizesort=false is used).
The other arguments, <type> and <label>, are the glossary type and the entry label for the current entry. Note that <type> will always be a control sequence, but <label> will be in the form used in the first argument of \newglossaryentry.
Example 1 (Mixing Alphabetical and Order of Definition Sorting)
Suppose I have three glossaries: main, acronym and notation, and let’s suppose I want the main and acronym glossaries to be sorted alphabetically, but the notation type should be sorted in order of definition.
For Option 1, I just need to set the sort key in the optional argument of \printnoidxglossary:
For Options 2 or 3, I can set the sort to standard (which is the default, but can be explicitly set via the package option sort=standard), and I can either define all my main and acronym entries, then redefine \glsprestandardsort to set <sort cs> to an incremented integer, and then define all my notation entries. Alternatively, I can redefine \glsprestandardsort to check for the glossary type and only modify <sort cs> if <type> is notation.
The first option can be achieved as follows:
The second option can be achieved as follows:
(\ifdefstring is defined by the etoolbox package.) For a complete document, see the sample file sampleSort.tex.
____________________________
Example 2 (Customizing Standard Sort (Options 2 or 3))
Suppose you want a glossary of people and you want the names listed as <first-name> <surname> in the glossary, but you want the names sorted by <surname>, <first-name>. You can do this by defining a command called, say, \name{<first-name>}{<surname>} that you can use in the name key when you define the entry, but hook into the standard sort mechanism to temporarily redefine \name while the sort value is being set.
First, define two commands to set the person’s name:
and \name needs to be initialised to \textname:
Now redefine \glsprestandardsort so that it temporarily sets \name to \sortname and expands the sort value, then sets \name to \textname so that the person’s name appears as <first-name> <surname> in the text:
(The somewhat complicate use of \expandafter etc helps to protect fragile commands, but care is still needed.)
Now the entries can be defined:
For a complete document, see the sample file samplePeople.tex.
____________________________
If you use Option 1, this setting will be used if you use sort=standard in the optional argument of \printnoidxglossary:
Alternatively, you can specify the order for individual glossaries:
You may omit this package option if you are using Option 2 as this is the default. It’s available in case you need to override the effect of an earlier occurrence of xindy in the package option list.
This package option may additionally have a value that is a <key>=<value> comma-separated list to override the language and codepage. For example:
You can also specify whether you want a number group in the glossary. This defaults to true, but can be suppressed. For example:
If no value is supplied to this package option (either simply writing xindy or writing xindy={}) then the language, codepage and number group settings are unchanged. See §11 Xindy (Option 3) for further details on using xindy with the glossaries package.
It will also define
that’s equivalent to
(unless that command is already defined before the beginning of the document or the package option compatible-3.07 is used).If you are using Option 1, you need to use
to display the list of acronyms.If the acronym package option is used, \acronymtype is set to acronym otherwise it is set to main.2.3 Entries that are defined using \newacronym are placed in the glossary whose label is given by \acronymtype, unless another glossary is explicitly specified.
No check is performed to determine if the listed glossaries exist, so you can add glossaries you haven’t defined yet. For example:
You can use
instead of or in addition to the acronymlists option. This will add the glossaries given in <list> to the list of glossaries that are identified as lists of acronyms. To replace the list of acronym lists with a new list use:
You can determine if a glossary has been identified as being a list of acronyms using:
The package options listed in this section are now deprecated but are kept for backward-compatibility. Use \setacronymstyle instead. See §13 Acronyms for further details.
or (with footnote and smallcaps)
or (with footnote and smaller)
or (with description and footnote)
This option may be replaced by:
or (with description and footnote)
or (with smallcaps and description)
or (with smaller and description)
Other available options that don’t fit any of the above categories are:
It also defines
which is a synonym for
If you use Option 1, you need to use:
to display the list of symbols.
It also defines
which is a synonym for
If you use Option 1, you need to use:
to display the list of numbers.
It also defines
which is a synonym for
andwhich is a synonym for
If you use Option 1, you need to use:
to display this glossary.
Since the index isn’t designed for terms with descriptions, you might also want
to disable the hyperlinks for this glossary using the package option
nohypertypes=index or the command
\GlsDeclareNoHyperList{index}
The example file sample-index.tex illustrates the use of the index package option.
Some of the options described above may also be set after the glossaries package has been loaded using
The following package options can’t be used in \setupglossaries: xindy, xindygloss, xindynoglsnumbers, makeindex, nolong, nosuper, nolist, notree, nostyles, nomain, compatible-2.07, translate, notranslate, acronym. These options have to be set while the package is loading, except for the xindy sub-options which can be set using commands like \GlsSetXdyLanguage (see §11 Xindy (Option 3) for further details).
In the preamble you need to indicate whether you want to use Option 1, Option 2 or Option 3. It’s not possible to mix these options within a document.
The command
must be placed in the preamble. This sets up the internal commands required to make Option 1 work. If you omit \makenoidxglossaries none of the glossaries will be displayed.
The command
must be placed in the preamble in order to create the customised makeindex (.ist) or xindy (.xdy) style file (for Options 2 or 3, respectively) and to ensure that glossary entries are written to the appropriate output files. If you omit \makeglossaries none of the glossary files will be created.
Similarly, there are some commands that must not be used before \makeglossaries.
You can suppress the creation of the customised xindy or makeindex style file using
That this command must not be used after \makeglossaries.
The default name for the customised style file is given by \jobname.ist (Option 2) or \jobname.xdy (Option 3). This name may be changed using:
where <name> is the name of the style file without the extension. Note that this command must not be used after \makeglossaries.
Each glossary entry is assigned a number list that lists all the locations in the document where that entry was used. By default, the location refers to the page number but this may be overridden using the counter package option. The default form of the location number assumes a full stop compositor (e.g. 1.2), but if your location numbers use a different compositor (e.g. 1-2) you need to set this using
For example:
This command must not be used after \makeglossaries.
If you use Option 3, you can have a different compositor for page numbers starting with an upper case alphabetical character using:
This command has no effect if you use Option 2. For example, if you want number lists containing a mixture of A-1 and 2.3 style formats, then do:
See §5 Number lists for further information about number lists.
All glossary entries must be defined before they are used, so it is better to define them in the preamble to ensure this. In fact, some commands such as \longnewglossaryentry may only be used in the preamble. See §4.8 Drawbacks With Defining Entries in the Document Environment for a discussion of the problems with defining entries within the document instead of in the preamble.
Only those entries that are referenced in the document (using any of the commands described in §6 Links to Glossary Entries, §7 Adding an Entry to the Glossary Without Generating Text or §8 Cross-Referencing Entries) will appear in the glossary. See §10 Displaying a glossary to find out how to display the glossary.
New glossary entries are defined using the command:
This is a short command, so values in <key-val list> can’t contain any paragraph breaks. If you have a long description that needs to span multiple paragraphs, use
instead. Note that this command may only be used in the preamble. Be careful of unwanted spaces. \longnewglossaryentry will remove trailing spaces in the description (via \unskip) but won’t remove leading spaces (otherwise it would interfere with commands like \Glsentrydesc).
There are also commands that will only define the entry if it hasn’t already been defined:
and
(These are both preamble-only commands.)
For all the above commands, the first argument, <label>, must be a unique label with which to identify this entry. This can’t contain any non-expandable commands or active characters.
The second argument, <key=value list>, is a <key>=<value> list that supplies the relevant information about this entry. There are two required fields: description and either name or parent. The description is set in the third argument of \longnewglossaryentry and \longprovideglossaryentry. With the other commands it’s set via the description key. Available fields are listed below:
to suppress the description terminator for this entry. For example, if this entry is a parent entry that doesn’t require a description, you can do description={\nopostdesc}. If you want a paragraph break in the description use
or, better, use \longnewglossaryentry. However, note that not all glossary styles support multi-line descriptions. If you are using one of the tabular-like glossary styles that permit multi-line descriptions, use \newline not \\ if you want to force a line break.
Note: prior to version 1.13, the default value of firstplural was always taken by appending “s” to the first key, which meant that you had to specify both plural and firstplural, even if you hadn’t used the first key.
Option 1 by default strips the standard LATEX accents (that is, accents generated by core LATEX commands) from the name key when it sets the sort key. So with Option 1:
This is equivalent to:
Unless you use the package option sanitizesort=true, in which case it’s equivalent to:
This will place the entry before the “A” letter group since the sort value starts with a symbol.
Similarly if you use the inputenc package:
With Options 2 and 3, the default value of sort will either be set to the name key (if sanitizesort=true) or it will set it to the expansion of the name key (if sanitizesort=false).
 You will either need to explicitly set the sort key or use the sanitizesort=true package option (unless you use the def or use sort methods).
The following keys are reserved for \newacronym (see §13 Acronyms): long, longplural, short and shortplural. Additional keys are provided by the glossaries-prefix (§17 Prefixes or Determiners) and the glossaries-accsupp (§18 Accessibility Support) packages. You can also define your own custom keys (see §4.3 Additional Keys).
Note that if the name starts with non-Latin character, you must group the character, otherwise it will cause a problem for commands like \Gls and \Glspl. For example:
Note that the same applies if you are using the inputenc package:
You may have noticed from above that you can specify the plural form when you define a term. If you omit this, the plural will be obtained by appending
to the singular form. This command defaults to the letter “s”. For example:
defines a new entry whose singular form is “cow” and plural form is “cows”. However, if you are writing in archaic English, you may want to use “kine” as the plural form, in which case you would have to do:
If you are writing in a language that supports multiple plurals (for a given term) then use the plural key for one of them and one of the user keys to specify the other plural form. For example:
You can then use \glspl{cow} to produce “cows” and \glsuseri{cow} to produce “kine”. You can, of course, define an easy to remember synonym. For example:
Then you don’t have to remember which key you used to store the second plural. Alternatively, you can define your own keys using \glsaddkey, described in §4.3 Additional Keys.
If you are using a language that usually forms plurals by appending a different letter, or sequence of letters, you can redefine \glspluralsuffix as required. However, this must be done before the entries are defined. For languages that don’t form plurals by simply appending a suffix, all the plural forms must be specified using the plural key (and the firstplural key where necessary).
You can use the six user keys to provide alternatives, such as participles. For example:
With the above definitions, I can now define terms like this:
and use them in the text:
Alternatively, you can define your own keys using \glsaddkey, described below in §4.3 Additional Keys.
You can now also define your own custom keys using:
where:
The starred version of \glsaddkey switches on expansion for this key. The unstarred version doesn’t override the current expansion setting.
Example 3 (Defining Custom Keys)
Suppose I want to define two new keys, ed and ing, that default to the entry text followed by “ed” and “ing”, respectively. The default value will need expanding in both cases, so I need to use the starred form:
Now I can define some entries:
These entries can later be used in the document:
For a complete document, see the sample file sample-newkeys.tex.
____________________________
When you define new glossary entries expansion is performed by default, except for the name, description, descriptionplural, symbol, symbolplural and sort keys (these keys all have expansion suppressed via \glssetnoexpandfield).
You can switch expansion on or off for individual keys using
or
respectively, where <field> is the field tag corresponding to the key. In most cases, this is the same as the name of the key except for those listed in table 4.1.
Any keys that haven’t had the expansion explicitly set using \glssetexpandfield or \glssetnoexpandfield are governed by
and
If your entries contain any fragile commands, I recommend you switch off expansion via \glsnoexpandfields. (This should be used before you define the entries.)
As from version 1.17, it is possible to specify sub-entries. These may be used to order the glossary into categories, in which case the sub-entry will have a different name to its parent entry, or it may be used to distinguish different definitions for the same word, in which case the sub-entries will have the same name as the parent entry. Note that not all glossary styles support hierarchical entries and may display all the entries in a flat format. Of the styles that support sub-entries, some display the sub-entry’s name whilst others don’t. Therefore you need to ensure that you use a suitable style. (See §15 Glossary Styles for a list of predefined styles.) As from version 3.0, level 1 sub-entries are automatically numbered in the predefined styles if you use the subentrycounter package option (see §2.3 Glossary Appearance Options for further details).
Note that the parent entry will automatically be added to the glossary if any of its child entries are used in the document. If the parent entry is not referenced in the document, it will not have a number list. Note also that makeindex has a restriction on the maximum sub-entry depth.
To arrange a glossary with hierarchical categories, you need to first define the category and then define the sub-entries using the relevant category entry as the value of the parent key.
Example 4 (Hierarchical Categories—Greek and Roman Mathematical Symbols)
Suppose I want a glossary of mathematical symbols that are divided into Greek letters and Roman letters. Then I can define the categories as follows:
Note that in this example, the category entries don’t need a description so I have set the descriptions to \nopostdesc. This gives a blank description and suppresses the description terminator.
I can now define my sub-entries as follows:
For a complete document, see the sample file sampletree.tex.
____________________________
Sub-entries that have the same name as the parent entry, don’t need to have the name key. For example, the word “glossary” can mean a list of technical words or a collection of glosses. In both cases the plural is “glossaries”. So first define the parent entry:
Again, the parent entry has no description, so the description terminator needs to be suppressed using \nopostdesc.
Now define the two different meanings of the word:
Note that if I reference the parent entry, the location will be added to the parent’s number list, whereas if I reference any of the child entries, the location will be added to the child entry’s number list. Note also that since the sub-entries have the same name, the sort key is required unless you are using the sort=use or sort=def package options (see §2.4 Sorting Options). You can use the subentrycounter package option to automatically number the first-level child entries. See §2.3 Glossary Appearance Options for further details.
In the above example, the plural form for both of the child entries is the same as the parent entry, so the plural key was not required for the child entries. However, if the sub-entries have different plurals, they will need to be specified. For example:
You can store all your glossary entry definitions in another file and use:
where <filename> is the name of the file containing all the \newglossaryentry or \longnewglossaryentry commands. The optional argument <type> is the name of the glossary to which those entries should belong, for those entries where the type key has been omitted (or, more specifically, for those entries whose type has been specified by \glsdefaulttype, which is what \newglossaryentry uses by default).
This is a preamble-only command. You may also use \input to load the file but don’t use \include.
Example 5 (Loading Entries from Another File)
Suppose I have a file called myentries.tex which contains:
and suppose in my document preamble I use the command:
then this will add the entries tex and html to the glossary whose type is given by languages, but the entry perl will be added to the main glossary, since it explicitly sets the type to main.
____________________________
Note: if you use \newacronym (see §13 Acronyms) the type is set as type=\acronymtype unless you explicitly override it. For example, if my file myacronyms.tex contains:
then (supposing I have defined a new glossary type called altacronym)
will add aca to the glossary type acronym, if the package option acronym has been specified, or will add aca to the glossary type altacronym, if the package option acronym is not specified.4.1
If you have used the acronym package option, there are two possible solutions to this problem:
and do:
Note that only those entries that have been used in the text will appear in the relevant glossaries. Note also that \loadglsentries may only be used in the preamble.
Remember that you can use \provideglossaryentry rather than \newglossaryentry. Suppose you want to maintain a large database of acronyms or terms that you’re likely to use in your documents, but you may want to use a modified version of some of those entries. (Suppose, for example, one document may require a more detailed description.) Then if you define the entries using \provideglossaryentry in your database file, you can override the definition by simply using \newglossaryentry before loading the file. For example, suppose your file (called, say, terms.tex) contains:
but suppose your document requires a more detailed description, you can do:
Now the mallard definition in the terms.tex file will be ignored.
As from version 3.02, you can move an entry from one glossary to another using:
where <label> is the unique label identifying the required entry and <target glossary label> is the unique label identifying the glossary in which to put the entry.
Note that no check is performed to determine the existence of the target glossary. This means that you can, for example, move an entry to an undefined glossary so you can use the entry in the document text but not have it listed in any of the glossaries. (Maybe you have an acronym that is so common it doesn’t need listing.)
Originally, \newglossaryentry (and \newacronym) could only be used in the preamble. I reluctantly removed this restriction in version 1.13, but there are issues with defining commands in the document environment instead of the preamble, which is why the restriction is maintained for newer commands. This restriction is also reimposed for \newglossaryentry by the new Option 1.
To overcome these problems, as from version 4.0 the glossaries package modifies the definition of \newglossaryentry at the beginning of the document environment so that the definitions are written to an external file (\jobname.glsdefs) which is then read in at the start of the document on the next run. The entry will then only be defined in the document environment if it doesn’t already exist. This means that the entry can now be looked up in the glossary, even if the glossary occurs at the beginning of the document.
There are drawbacks to this mechanism: if you modify an entry definition, you need a second run to see the effect of your modification; this method requires an extra \newwrite, which may exceed TEX’s maximum allocation; unexpected expansion issues could occur; if you have very long entries, you could find unexpected line breaks have been written to the temporary file causing spurious spaces (or, even worse, a command name could get split across a line causing an error message).
The last reason is why \longnewglossaryentry has the preamble-only restriction, which I don’t intend to lift.
The above section covers technical issues that can cause your document to have compilation errors or produce incorrect output. This section focuses on good writing practice. The main reason cited by users wanting to define entries within the document environment rather than in the preamble is that they want to write the definition as they type in their document text. This suggests a “stream of consciousness” style of writing that may be acceptable in certain literary genres but is inappropriate for factual documents.
When you write technical documents, regardless of whether it’s a PhD thesis or an article for a journal or proceedings, you must plan what you write in advance. If you plan in advance, you should have a fairly good idea of the type of terminology that your document will contain, so while you are planning, create a new file with all your entry definitions. If, while you’re writing your document, you remember another term you need, then you can switch over to your definition file and add it. Most text editors have the ability to have more than one file open at a time. The other advantage to this approach is that if you forget the label, you can look it up in the definition file rather than searching through your document text to find the definition.
Each entry in the glossary has an associated number list. By default, these numbers refer to the pages on which that entry has been used (using any of the commands described in §6 Links to Glossary Entries and §7 Adding an Entry to the Glossary Without Generating Text). The number list can be suppressed using the nonumberlist package option, or an alternative counter can be set as the default using the counter package option. The number list is also referred to as the location list.
Both makeindex and xindy (Options 2 and 3) concatenate a sequence of 3 or more consecutive pages into a range. With xindy (Option 3) you can vary the minimum sequence length using \GlsSetXdyMinRangeLength{<n>} where <n> is either an integer or the keyword none which indicates that there should be no range formation.
With both makeindex and xindy (Options 2 and 3), you can replace the separator and the closing number in the range using:
where the former command specifies the suffix to use for a 2 page list and the latter specifies the suffix to use for longer lists. For example:
Note that if you use xindy (Option 3), you will also need to set the minimum range length to 1 if you want to change these suffixes:
Note that if you use the hyperref package, you will need to use \nohyperpage in the suffix to ensure that the hyperlinks work correctly. For example:
Option 1 doesn’t form ranges. However, with this option you can iterate over an entry’s number list using:
where <label> is the entry’s label and <handler cs> is a handler control sequence of the form:
where <prefix> is the hyperref prefix, <counter> is the name of the counter used for the location, <format> is the format used to display the location (e.g. textbf) and <location> is the location. The third argument is the control sequence to use for any cross-references in the list. This handler should have the syntax:
where <tag> is the cross-referenced text (e.g. “see”) and <xr list> is a comma-separated list of labels. (This actually has a third argument but it’s always empty when used with Option 1.)
For example, if on page 12 I have used
and on page 18 I have used
then
will be equivalent to:
There is a predefined handler that’s used to display the number list in the glossary:
The predefined handler used for the cross-references in the glossary is:
which is described in §8.1 Customising Cross-reference Text.
Once you have defined a glossary entry using \newglossaryentry, you can refer to that entry in the document using one of the commands listed in this section. The text which appears at that point in the document when using one of these commands is referred to as the link text (even if there are no hyperlinks). The commands in this section also add a line to an external file that is used to generate the relevant entry in the glossary. This information includes an associated location that is added to the number list for that entry. By default, the location refers to the page number. For further information on number lists, see §5 Number lists.
The above warning is particularly important if you are using the glossaries package in conjunction with the hyperref package. Instead, use one of the expandable commands listed in §9 Using Glossary Terms Without Links (such as \glsentrytext but not the non-expandable case changing versions like \Glsentrytext) or provide an alternative via the optional argument to the sectioning/caption command. Examples:
If you want the link text to produce a hyperlink to the corresponding entry details in the glossary, you should load the hyperref package before the glossaries package. That’s what I’ve done in this document, so if you see a hyperlinked term, such as link text, you can click on the word or phrase and it will take you to a brief description in this document’s glossary.
It may be that you only want terms in certain glossaries to have links, but not for other glossaries. In this case, you can use the package option nohypertypes to identify the glossary lists that shouldn’t have hyperlinked link text. For example, suppose your document contains lots of technical acronyms that the reader might not know, but it also contains some very common acronyms that most readers will recognise. So you might want two acronym lists, but only the technical list will get displayed in your document. The technical acronyms can be hyperlinked to that list, but common acronyms shouldn’t have hyperlinks as there’s no target for them. In this case, identify the common acronym list as having non-hyperlinked entries using nohypertypes. Example:
Alternatively, you can use
For example:
Note that no check is performed to see if the glossary types listed in nohypertypes or \GlsDeclareNoHyperList have been defined.
is correct, but nohypertypes={{acronym},{common}} won’t work.
You can override the effect of nohypertypes or \GlsDeclareNoHyperList by explicitly setting the hyper option in commands such as \glslink or \gls.
The way the link text is displayed depends on
For example, to make all link text appear in a sans-serif font, do:
Further customisation can be done via \defglsentryfmt or by redefining \glsentryfmt. See §6.1 Changing the format of the link text for further details.
Each entry has an associated conditional referred to as the first use flag. This determines whether \gls or \glspl (or their upper case variants) should use the value of the first/firstplural or text/plural keys. Note that an entry can be used without affecting the first use flag (for example, when used with \glslink). See §14 Unsetting and Resetting Entry Flags for commands that unset or reset this conditional.
The command:
will place \glstextformat{<text>} in the document at that point and add a line into the associated glossary file for the glossary entry given by <label>. If hyperlinks are supported, <text> will be a hyperlink to the relevant line in the glossary. (Note that this command doesn’t affect the first use flag: use \glsdisp instead.) The optional argument <options> must be a <key>=<value> list which can take any of the following keys:
and use that command.
In this document, the standard formats refer to the standard text block commands such as \textbf or \emph or any of the commands listed in table 6.1.
See §11 Xindy (Option 3) for further details.
Note that unlike \index, you can’t have anything following the command name, such as an asterisk or arguments. If you want to cross-reference another entry, either use the see key when you define the entry or use \glssee (described in §8 Cross-Referencing Entries).
If you are using hyperlinks and you want to change the font of the hyperlinked location, don’t use \hyperpage (provided by the hyperref package) as the locations may not refer to a page number. Instead, the glossaries package provides number formats listed in table 6.1.
Note that if the \hyperlink command hasn’t been defined, the hyper<xx> formats are equivalent to the analogous text<xx> font commands (and hyperemph is equivalent to emph). If you want to make a new format, you will need to define a command which takes one argument and use that. For example, if you want the location number to be in a bold sans-serif font, you can define a command called, say, \hyperbsf:
and then use hyperbsf as the value for the format key. (See also “Displaying the glossary” in the documented code, glossaries-code.pdf.) Remember that if you use xindy, you will need to add this to the list of location attributes:
There is also a starred version:
which is equivalent to \glslink, except it sets hyper=false. Similarly, all the following commands described in this section also have a starred version that disables the hyperlink.
The command:
is the same as \glslink, except that the link text is determined from the values of the text and first keys supplied when the entry was defined using \newglossaryentry. If the entry has been marked as having been used, the value of the text key will be used, otherwise the value of the first key will be used. On completion, \gls will mark the entry’s first use flag as used.
There are two upper case variants:
and
which make the first letter of the link text or all the link text upper case, respectively.
The final optional argument <insert>, allows you to insert some additional text into the link text. By default, this will append <insert> at the end of the link text, but this can be changed (see §6.1 Changing the format of the link text).
The first optional argument <options> is the same as the optional argument to \glslink. As with \glslink, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
There are also analogous plural forms:
These determine the link text from the plural and firstplural keys supplied when the entry was first defined. As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
and later you use it in math mode:
This will result in Fα2 instead of Fα2. In this situation it’s best to bring the superscript into the hyperlink using the final <insert> optional argument:
Note that \glslink doesn’t use or affect the first use flag, nor does it use \glsentryfmt or the equivalent definition provided by \defglsentryfmt (see §6.1 Changing the format of the link text). Instead, you can use:
This behaves in the same way as \gls, except that it uses <link text> instead of the value of the first or text key. (Note that this command always sets <insert> to nothing.) This command affects the first use flag, and uses \glsentryfmt or the equivalent definition provided by \defglsentryfmt.
The command:
is similar to \gls except that it always uses the value of the text key and does not affect the first use flag. Unlike \gls, the inserted text <insert> is always appended to the link text since \glstext doesn’t use \glsentryfmt or the equivalent definition provided by \defglsentryfmt. (The same is true for all the following commands described in the rest of this section.)
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the first key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not affect the first use flag.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the plural key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the firstplural key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the name key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the symbol key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the description key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink.
The command:
is similar to \glstext except that it always uses the value of the user1 key. Again, <insert> is always appended to the end of the link text and does not mark the entry as having been used.
There are also analogous commands:
As before, these commands also have a starred version that disable the hyperlink. Similarly for the other user keys:
The default format of the link text for \gls, \glspl and their upper case variants and also for \glsdisp is governed by6.1:
This may be redefined but if you only want the change the display style for a given glossary, then you need to use
instead of redefining \glsentryfmt. The optional first argument <type> is the glossary type. This defaults to \glsdefaulttype if omitted. The second argument is the entry format definition.
Within the <definition> argument of \defglsentryfmt, or if you want to redefine \glsentryfmt, you may use the following commands:
This is the label of the entry being referenced.
This is the custom text supplied in \glsdisp. It’s always empty for \gls, \glspl and their upper case variants. (You can use etoolbox’s \ifdefempty to determine if \glscustomtext is empty.)
The custom text supplied in the final optional argument to \gls, \glspl and their upper case variants.
If \glspl, \Glspl or \GLSpl was used, this command does <true text> otherwise it does <false text>.
If \gls, \glspl or \glsdisp were used, this does <no case>. If \Gls or \Glspl were used, this does <first uc>. If \GLS or \GLSpl were used, this does <all caps>.
This will do <hyper true> if the unstarred version (hyper=true) was used and will be <hyper false> if the starred version (hyper=false) was used. Note that this isn’t the same as testing the internal conditional that the hyper key sets, as this can subsequently change depending on package options such as hyperfirst and nohypertypes.
Note that you can also use commands such as \ifglsused within the definition of \glsentryfmt (see §14 Unsetting and Resetting Entry Flags).
If you only want to make minor modifications to \glsentryfmt, you can use
This uses the above commands to display just the first, text, plural or firstplural keys (or the custom text) with the insert text appended.
Alternatively, if want to change the entry format for acronyms (defined via \newacronym) you can use:
This uses the values from the long, short, longplural and shortplural keys, rather than using the text, plural, first and firstplural keys. The first use singular text is obtained via:
instead of from the first key, and the first use plural text is obtained via:
instead of from the firstplural key. In both cases, <label> is the entry’s label and <insert> is the insert text provided in the final optional argument of commands like \gls. The default behaviour is to do the long form (or plural long form) followed by <insert> and a space and the short form (or plural short form) in parentheses, where the short form is in the argument of \firstacronymfont. There are also first letter upper case versions:
and
By default these perform a protected expansion on their no-case-change equivalents and then use \makefirstuc to convert the first character to upper case. If there are issues caused by this expansion, you will need to redefine those commands to explicitly use commands like \Glsentrylong (which is what the predefined acronym styles, such as long-short, do). Otherwise, you only need to redefine \genacrfullformat and \genplacrfullformat to change the behaviour of \glsgenacfmt. See §13 Acronyms for further details on changing the style of acronyms.
Example 6 (Custom Entry Display in Text)
Suppose you want a glossary of measurements and units, you can use the symbol key to store the unit:
and now suppose you want \gls{distance} to produce “distance (km)” on first use, then you can redefine \glsentryfmt as follows:
(Note that I’ve used \glsentrysymbol rather than \glssymbol to avoid nested hyperlinks.)
Note also that all of the link text will be formatted according to \glstextformat (described earlier). So if you do, say:
then \gls{distance} will produce “distance (km)”.
For a complete document, see the sample file sample-entryfmt.tex.
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Example 7 (Custom Format for Particular Glossary)
Suppose you have created a new glossary called notation and you want to change the way the entry is displayed on first use so that it includes the symbol, you can do:
Now suppose you have defined an entry as follows:
The first time you reference this entry it will be displayed as: “set (denoted S)” (assuming \gls was used).
Alternatively, if you expect all the symbols to be set in math mode, you can do:
and define entries like this:
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Remember that if you use the symbol key, you need to use a glossary style that displays the symbol, as many of the styles ignore it.
If you load the hyperref or html packages prior to loading the glossaries package, commands such as \glslink and \gls, described above, will automatically have hyperlinks to the relevant glossary entry, unless the hyper option has been set to false. You can disable or enable links using:
and
respectively. The effect can be localised by placing the commands within a group. Note that you should only use \glsenablehyper if the commands \hyperlink and \hypertarget have been defined (for example, by the hyperref package).
You can disable just the first use links using the package option hyperfirst=false. Note that this option only affects commands that recognise the first use flag, for example \gls, \glspl and \glsdisp but not \glslink.
Example 8 (First Use With Hyperlinked Footnote Description)
Suppose I want the first use to have a hyperlink to the description in a footnote instead of hyperlinking to the relevant place in the glossary. First I need to disable the hyperlinks on first use via the package option hyperfirst=false:
Now I need to redefine \glsentryfmt (see §6.1 Changing the format of the link text):
Now the first use won’t have hyperlinked text, but will be followed by a footnote. See the sample file sample-FnDesc.tex for a complete document.
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Note that the hyperfirst option applies to all defined glossaries. It may be that you only want to disable the hyperlinks on first use for glossaries that have a different form on first use. This can be achieved by noting that since the entries that require hyperlinking for all instances have identical first and subsequent text, they can be unset via \glsunsetall (see §14 Unsetting and Resetting Entry Flags) so that the hyperfirst option doesn’t get applied.
Example 9 (Suppressing Hyperlinks on First Use Just For Acronyms)
Suppose I want to suppress the hyperlink on first use for acronyms but not for entries in the main glossary. I can load the glossaries package using:
Once all glossary entries have been defined I then do:
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For more complex requirements, you might find it easier to switch off all hyperlinks via \glsdisablehyper and put the hyperlinks (where required) within the definition of \glsentryfmt (see §6.1 Changing the format of the link text) via \glshyperlink (see §9 Using Glossary Terms Without Links).
Example 10 (Only Hyperlink in Text Mode Not Math Mode)
This is a bit of a contrived example, but suppose, for some reason, I only want commands like \gls and \glsdisp to have hyperlinks when used in text mode, but not in math mode. I can do this by disabling all hyperlinks and redefining \glsentryfmt:
To ensure the target exists, the hyperlinks must be enabled again when the glossary is displayed:
(The redefinition of \glossarypostamble is only necessary if the glossary is displayed at the start of the document instead of at the end.) See the sample file sample-nomathhyper.tex for a complete document.
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It is possible to add a line in the glossary file without generating any text at that point in the document using:
This is similar to \glslink, only it doesn’t produce any text (so therefore, there is no hyper key available in <options> but all the other options that can be used with \glslink can be passed to \glsadd). For example, to add a page range to the glossary number list for the entry whose label is given by set:
To add all entries that have been defined, use:
The optional argument is the same as for \glsadd, except there is also a key types which can be used to specify which glossaries to use. This should be a comma separated list. For example, if you only want to add all the entries belonging to the list of acronyms (specified by the glossary type \acronymtype) and a list of notation (specified by the glossary type notation) then you can do:
There is now a variation of \glsaddall that skips any entries that have already been used:
This command uses \glsadd[format=@gobble] which will ignore this location in the number list. The optional argument <list> is a comma-separated list of glossary types. If omitted, it defaults to the list of all defined glossaries.
The example file sample-dual.tex makes use of \glsadd to allow for an entry that should appear both in the main glossary and in the list of acronyms. This example sets up the list of acronyms using the acronym package option:
A new command is then defined to make it easier to define dual entries:
This has the following syntax:
You can then define a new dual entry:Now you can reference the acronym with \gls{svm} or you can reference the entry in the main glossary with \gls{main-svm}.
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There are several ways of cross-referencing entries in the glossary:
Note that with this method, if you don’t use the cross-referenced term in the main part of the document, you will need two runs of makeglossaries:
Note that in this case, the entry with the see key will automatically be added to the glossary, but the cross-referenced entry won’t. You therefore need to ensure that you use the cross-referenced term with the commands described in §6 Links to Glossary Entries or §7 Adding an Entry to the Glossary Without Generating Text.
The “see” tag is produce using \seename, but can be overridden in specific instances using square brackets at the start of the see value. For example:
Take care if you want to use the optional argument of commands such as \newacronym or \newterm as the value will need to be grouped. For example:
Similarly if the value contains a list. For example:
where <xr label list> is a comma-separated list of entry labels to be cross-referenced, <label> is the label of the entry doing the cross-referencing and <tag> is the “see” tag. (The default value of <tag> is \seename.) For example:
Note that this automatically adds the entry given by <label> to the glossary but doesn’t add the cross-referenced entries (specified by <xr label list>) to the glossary.
In both cases 2 and 3 above, the cross-referenced information appears in the number list, whereas in case 1, the cross-referenced information appears in the description. (See the sample-crossref.tex example file that comes with this package.) This means that in cases 2 and 3, the cross-referencing information won’t appear if you have suppressed the number list. In this case, you will need to activate the number list for the given entries using nonumberlist=false. Alternatively, if you just use the see key instead of \glssee, you can automatically activate the number list using the seeautonumberlist package option.
When you use either the see key or the command \glssee, the cross-referencing information will be typeset in the glossary according to:
The default definition of \glsseeformat is:
\emph{<tag>} \glsseelist{<label-list>}
The list of labels is dealt with by \glsseelist, which iterates through the list and typesets each entry in the label. The entries are separated by
or (for the last pair)
These default to “,\space” and “\space\andname\space” respectively. The list entry text is displayed using:
This defaults to \glsentrytext{<label>}.8.3 For example, to make the cross-referenced list use small caps:
The commands described in this section display entry details without adding any information to the glossary. They don’t use \glstextformat, they don’t have any optional arguments, they don’t affect the first use flag and, apart from \glshyperlink, they don’t produce hyperlinks.
These commands display the name of the glossary entry given by <label>, as specified by the name key. \Glsentryname makes the first letter upper case. Neither of these commands check for the existence of <label>. The first form \glsentryname is expandable (unless the name contains unexpandable commands).
This is like \glsnamefont{\glsentryname{<label>}} but also checks for the existence of <label>. This command is not expandable. It’s used in the predefined glossary styles, so if you want to change the way the name is formatted in the glossary, you can redefine \glsnamefont to use the required fonts. For example:
This is like \glossentryname but makes the first letter of the name upper case.
These commands display the subsequent use text for the glossary entry given by <label>, as specified by the text key. \Glsentrytext makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the text contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the subsequent use plural text for the glossary entry given by <label>, as specified by the plural key. \Glsentryplural makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the first use text for the glossary entry given by <label>, as specified by the first key. \Glsentryfirst makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the plural form of the first use text for the glossary entry given by <label>, as specified by the firstplural key. \Glsentryfirstplural makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the description for the glossary entry given by <label>. \Glsentrydesc makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
This is like \glsentrydesc{<label>} but also checks for the existence of <label>. This command is not expandable. It’s used in the predefined glossary styles to display the description.
This is like \glossentrydesc but converts the first letter to upper case. This command is not expandable.
These commands display the plural description for the glossary entry given by <label>. \Glsentrydescplural makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the symbol for the glossary entry given by <label>. \Glsentrysymbol makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
This command doesn’t display anything it merely fetches the value associated with field (where the available field names are listed in table 4.1) and stores the result in the control sequence <cs>. For example, to store the description for the entry whose label is “apple” in the control sequence \tmp:
This is like \glsentrysymbol{<label>} but also checks for the existence of <label>. This command is not expandable. It’s used in the predefined glossary styles to display the symbol.
This is like \glossentrysymbol but converts the first letter to upper case. This command is not expandable.
These commands display the plural symbol for the glossary entry given by <label>. \Glsentrysymbolplural makes the first letter upper case. The first form is expandable (unless the value of that key contains unexpandable commands). The second form is not expandable. Neither checks for the existence of <label>.
These commands display the value of the user keys for the glossary entry given by <label>. The lower case forms are expandable (unless the value of the key contains unexpandable commands). The commands beginning with an upper case letter convert the first letter of the required value to upper case and are not expandable. None of these commands check for the existence of <label>.
This command provides a hyperlink to the glossary entry given by <label> but does not add any information to the glossary file. The link text is given by \glsentrytext{<label>} by default9.1, but can be overridden using the optional argument.
The next two commands are only available with Option 1 or with the savenumberlist package option:
Both display the number list for the entry given by <label>. When used with Option 1 a rerun is required to ensure this list is up-to-date, when used with Options 2 or 3 a run of makeglossaries (or makeindex/xindy) followed by one or two runs of LATEX is required.
The first command, \glsentrynumberlist, simply displays the number list as is. The second command, \glsdisplaynumberlist, formats the list using:
as the separator between all but the last two elements and
between the final two elements. The defaults are ,␣ and ␣\&␣, respectively.
For further information see “Displaying entry details without adding information to the glossary” in the documented code (glossaries-code.pdf).
These commands will display all the glossaries in the order in which they were defined. Note that, in the case of Options 2 and 3, no glossaries will appear until you have either used the Perl script makeglossaries or have directly used makeindex or xindy (as described in §1.3 Generating the Associated Glossary Files). If the glossary still does not appear after you re-LATEX your document, check the makeindex/xindy log files to see if there is a problem. With Option 1, you just need two LATEX runs to make the glossaries appear, but you may need further runs to make the number lists up-to-date.
An individual glossary can be displayed using:
where <options> is a <key>=<value> list of options. The following keys are available:
The word and letter order sort methods use datatool’s \dtlwordindexcompare and \dtlletterindexcompare handlers. The case-insensitive sort method uses datatool’s \dtlicompare handler. The case-sensitive sort method uses datatool’s \dtlcompare handler. See the datatool documentation for further details.
If you don’t get an error with sort=use and sort=def but you do get an error with one of the other sort options, then you probably need to use the sanitizesort=true package option or make sure none of the entries have fragile commands in their sort field.
By default, the glossary is started either by \chapter* or by \section*, depending on whether or not \chapter is defined. This can be overridden by the section package option or the \setglossarysection command. Numbered sectional units can be obtained using the numberedsection package option. Each glossary sets the page header via the command
If this mechanism is unsuitable for your chosen class file or page style package, you will need to redefine \glsglossarymark. Further information about these options and commands is given in §2.2 Sectioning, Headings and TOC Options.
Information can be added to the start of the glossary (after the title and before the main body of the glossary) by redefining
For example:
This needs to be done before the glossary is displayed.
If you want a different preamble per glossary you can use
If <type> is omitted, \glsdefaulttype is used.
For example:
This will print the given preamble text for the main glossary, but not have any preamble text for any other glossaries.
There is an analogous command to \glossarypreamble called
which is placed at the end of each glossary.
Example 12 (Switch to Two Column Mode for Glossary)
Suppose you are using the superheaderborder style10.1, and you want the glossary to be in two columns, but after the glossary you want to switch back to one column mode, you could do:
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Within each glossary, each entry name is formatted according to
which takes one argument: the entry name. This command is always used regardless of the glossary style. By default, \glsnamefont simply displays its argument in whatever the surrounding font happens to be. This means that in the list-like glossary styles (defined in the glossary-list style file) the name will appear in bold, since the name is placed in the optional argument of \item, whereas in the tabular styles (defined in the glossary-long and glossary-super style files) the name will appear in the normal font. The hierarchical glossary styles (defined in the glossary-tree style file) also set the name in bold.
Example 13 (Changing the Font Used to Display Entry Names in the Glossary)
Suppose you want all the entry names to appear in medium weight small caps in your glossaries, then you can do:
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If you want to use xindy to sort the glossary, you must use the package option xindy:
This ensures that the glossary information is written in xindy syntax.
§1.3 Generating the Associated Glossary Files covers how to use the external indexing application. This section covers the commands provided by the glossaries package that allow you to adjust the xindy style file (.xdy) and parameters.
To assist writing information to the xindy style file, the glossaries package provides the following commands:
which produce an open and closing brace. (This is needed because \{ and \} don’t expand to a simple brace character when written to a file.)
In addition, if you are using a package that makes the double quote character active (e.g. ngerman) you can use:
which will produce "<text>". Alternatively, you can use \string" to write the double-quote character. This document assumes that the double quote character has not been made active, so the examples just use " for clarity.
If you want greater control over the xindy style file than is available through the LATEX commands provided by the glossaries package, you will need to edit the xindy style file. In which case, you must use \noist to prevent the style file from being overwritten by the glossaries package. For additional information about xindy, read the xindy documentation. I’m sorry I can’t provide any assistance with writing xindy style files. If you need help, I recommend you ask on the xindy mailing list (http://xindy.sourceforge.net/mailing-_list.html).
When you use xindy, you need to specify the language and encoding used (unless you have written your own custom xindy style file that defines the relevant alphabet and sort rules). If you use makeglossaries, this information is obtained from the document’s auxiliary (.aux) file. The makeglossaries script attempts to find the root language given your document settings, but in the event that it gets it wrong or if xindy doesn’t support that language, then you can specify the required language using:
where <language> is the name of the language. The optional argument can be used if you have multiple glossaries in different languages. If <glossary type> is omitted, it will be applied to all glossaries, otherwise the language setting will only be applied to the glossary given by <glossary type>.
If the inputenc package is used, the encoding will be obtained from the value of \inputencodingname. Alternatively, you can specify the encoding using:
where <code> is the name of the encoding. For example:
Note that you can also specify the language and encoding using the package option xindy={language=<lang>,codepage=<code>}. For example:
If you write your own custom xindy style file that includes the language settings, you need to set the language to nothing:
(and remember to use \noist to prevent the style file from being overwritten).
If you use xindy, the glossaries package needs to know which counters you will be using in the number list in order to correctly format the xindy style file. Counters specified using the counter package option or the <counter> option of \newglossary are automatically taken care of, but if you plan to use a different counter in the counter key for commands like \glslink, then you need to identify these counters before \makeglossaries using:
where <counter list> is a comma-separated list of counter names.
The most likely attributes used in the format key (textrm, hyperrm etc) are automatically added to the xindy style file, but if you want to use another attribute, you need to add it using:
where <name> is the name of the attribute, as used in the format key.
Example 14 (Custom Font for Displaying a Location)
Suppose I want a bold, italic, hyperlinked location. I first need to define a command that will do this:
but with xindy, I also need to add this as an allowed attribute:
Now I can use it in the optional argument of commands like \gls:
(where sample is the label of the required entry).
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If the location numbers don’t get expanded to a simple Arabic or Roman number or a letter from a, …, z or A, …, Z, then you need to add a location style in the appropriate format using
where <name> is the name of the format and <definition> is the xindy definition. The optional argument <prefix-location> is needed if \theH<counter> either isn’t defined or is different from \the<counter>.
Example 15 (Custom Numbering System for Locations)
Suppose I decide to use a somewhat eccentric numbering system for sections where I redefine \thesection as follows:
If I haven’t done counter=section in the package option, I need to specify that the counter will be used as a location number:
Next I need to add the location style (\thechapter is assumed to be the standard \arabic{chapter}):
Note that if I have further decided to use the hyperref package and want to redefine \theHsection as:
then I need to modify the \GlsAddXdyLocation code above to:
Since \Roman will result in an empty string if the counter is zero, it’s a good idea to add an extra location to catch this:
This example is illustrated in the sample file samplexdy2.tex.
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Example 16 (Locations as Words not Digits)
Suppose I want the page numbers written as words rather than digits and I use the fmtcount package to do this. I can redefine \thepage as follows:
This gets expanded to \protect \Numberstringnum {<n>} where <n> is the Arabic page number. This means that I need to define a new location that has that form:
Note that it’s necessary to use \space to indicate that spaces also appear in the format, since, unlike TEX, xindy doesn’t ignore spaces after control sequences.
Note that \GlsAddXdyLocation{<name>}{<definition>} will define commands in the form:
for each counter that has been identified either by the counter package option, the <counter> option for \newglossary or in the argument of \GlsAddXdyCounters.
The first argument <Hprefix> is only relevant when used with the hyperref package and indicates that \the<Hcounter> is given by \Hprefix.\the<counter>. The sample file samplexdy.tex, which comes with the glossaries package, uses the default page counter for locations, and it uses the default \glsnumberformat and a custom \hyperbfit format. A new xindy location called Numberstring, as illustrated above, is defined to make the page numbers appear as “One”, “Two”, etc. In order for the location numbers to hyperlink to the relevant pages, I need to redefine the necessary \glsX<counter>X<format> commands:
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In the number list, the locations are sorted according to type. The default ordering is: roman-page-numbers (e.g. i), arabic-page-numbers (e.g. 1), arabic-section-numbers (e.g. 1.1 if the compositor is a full stop or 1-1 if the compositor is a hyphen11.1), alpha-page-numbers (e.g. a), Roman-page-numbers (e.g. I), Alpha-page-numbers (e.g. A), Appendix-page-numbers (e.g. A.1 if the Alpha compositor is a full stop or A-1 if the Alpha compositor is a hyphen11.2), user defined location names (as specified by \GlsAddXdyLocation in the order in which they were defined), see (cross-referenced entries). This ordering can be changed using:
where each location name is delimited by double quote marks and separated by white space. For example:
If a number list consists of a sequence of consecutive numbers, the range will be concatenated. The number of consecutive locations that causes a range formation defaults to 2, but can be changed using:
For example:
The argument may also be the keyword none, to indicate that there should be no range formations. See the xindy manual for further details on range formations.
See §5 Number lists for further details.
The glossary is divided into groups according to the first letter of the sort key. The glossaries package also adds a number group by default, unless you suppress it in the xindy package option. For example:
Any entry that doesn’t go in one of the letter groups or the number group is placed in the default group.
If you have a number group, the default behaviour is to locate it before the “A” letter group. If you are not using a Roman alphabet, you can change this using:
\GlsSetXdyFirstLetterAfterDigits
A new glossary can be defined using:
where <name> is the label to assign to this glossary. The arguments <in-ext> and <out-ext> specify the extensions to give to the input and output files for that glossary, <title> is the default title for this new glossary and the final optional argument <counter> specifies which counter to use for the associated number lists (see also §5 Number lists). The first optional argument specifies the extension for the makeindex (Option 2) or xindy (Option 3) transcript file (this information is only used by makeglossaries which picks up the information from the auxiliary file). If you use Option 1, the <log-ext>, <in-ext> and <out-ext> arguments are ignored.
You can also use:
This is equivalent to
Note that the main (default) glossary is automatically created as:
so it can be identified by the label main (unless the nomain package option is used). Using the acronym package option is equivalent to:
so it can be identified by the label acronym. If you are not sure whether the acronym option has been used, you can identify the list of acronyms by the command \acronymtype \acronymtype which is set to acronym, if the acronym option has been used, otherwise it is set to main. Note that if you are using the main glossary as your list of acronyms, you need to declare it as a list of acronyms using the package option acronymlists.
The symbols package option creates a new glossary with the label symbols using:
The numbers package option creates a new glossary with the label numbers using:
The index package option creates a new glossary with the label index using:
See §1.2.1 Changing the Fixed Names if you want to redefine \glossaryname, especially if you are using babel or translator. (Similarly for \glssymbolsgroupname and \glsnumbersgroupname.) If you want to redefine \indexname, just follow the advice in How to change LaTeX’s “fixed names”.
You may have noticed in §4 Defining Glossary Entries that when you specify a new entry, you can specify alternate text to use when the term is first used in the document. This provides a useful means to define acronyms. For convenience, the glossaries package defines the command:
This uses \newglossaryentry to create an entry with the given label in the glossary given by \acronymtype. You can specify a different glossary using the type key within the optional argument. The \newacronym command also uses the long, longplural, short and shortplural keys in \newglossaryentry to store the long and abbreviated forms and their plurals.
The optional argument {<key-val list>} allows you to specify keys such as description (when used with one of the styles that require a description, described in §13.1 Changing the Acronym Style) or you can override plural forms of <abbrv> or <long> using the shortplural or longplural keys. For example:
If the first use uses the plural form, \glspl{dm} will display: diagonal matrices (DMs). If you want to use the longplural or shortplural keys, I recommend you use \setacronymstyle to set the display style rather than using one of the pre-version 4.02 acronym styles.
Since \newacronym uses \newglossaryentry, you can use commands like \gls and \glsreset as with any other glossary entry.
Example 17 (Defining an Acronym)
The following defines the acronym IDN:
\gls{idn} will produce “identification number (IDN)” on first use and “IDN” on subsequent uses. If you want to use one of the smallcaps acronym styles, described in §13.1 Changing the Acronym Style, you need to use lower case characters for the shortened form:
Now \gls{idn} will produce “identification number (idn)” on first use and “idn” on subsequent uses.
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There are commands similar to \glstext (described in §6 Links to Glossary Entries) that allow you to access just the short form, just the long form or the full form, without affecting the first use flag. (Note that the full form isn’t necessarily the same as the text produced on first use.)
This displays the short form (within the argument of \acronymfont) for the entry given by <label>. The optional arguments are the same as those for \glstext. There is also a starred version to suppress the hyperlink. There are also analogous upper case variants:
There are also plural versions:
Similarly for the long form:
This displays the long form for the entry given by <label>. The optional arguments are the same as before. There is also a starred version to suppress the hyperlink. There are also analogous upper case variants:
Again there are also plural versions:
And for the full form:
This defaults to <long> (\acronymfont{<short>}). The format (including hyperlinks) can be modified by redefining:
There are also analogous upper case variants:
The formats (including hyperlinks) can be modified by redefining:
As before there are also plural versions:
The formats (including hyperlinks) can be modified by redefining:
If you find the above commands too cumbersome to write, you can use the shortcuts package option to activate the shorter command names listed in table 13.1.
It is also possible to access the long and short forms without adding information to the glossary using commands analogous to \glsentrytext (described in §9 Using Glossary Terms Without Links).
The long form can be accessed using:
or, with the first letter converted to upper case:
Plural forms:
Similarly, to access the short form:
or, with the first letter converted to upper case:
Plural forms:
And the full form, <long> (<short>), can be obtained using:
(These may be redefined by the acronym style.)
It may be that the default style doesn’t suit your requirements in which case you can switch to another styles via
where <style name> is the name of the required style.
Note that unlike the default behaviour of \newacronym, the styles used via \setacronymstyle don’t use the first or text keys, but instead they use \defglsentryfmt to set a custom format that uses the long and short keys (or their plural equivalents). This means that these styles cope better with plurals that aren’t formed by simply appending the singular form with the letter “s”. In fact, most of the predefined styles use \glsgenacfmt and modify the definitions of commands like \genacrfullformat.
Note that when you use \setacronymstyle the name key is set to
These commands are redefined by the acronym styles. However, you can redefine them again after the style has been set but before you use \newacronym. Protected expansion is performed on \acronymsort when the entry is defined.
The glossaries package provides a number of predefined styles. These styles apply
to the short form on first use and
on subsequent use. The styles modify the definition of \acronymfont as required, but \firstacronymfont is only set once by the package when it’s loaded. By default \firstacronymfont{<text>} is the same as \acronymfont{<text>}. If you want the short form displayed differently on first use, you can redefine \firstacronymfont independently of the acronym style.
The predefined styles that contain sc in their name (for example long-sc-short) redefine \acronymfont to use \textsc (so the short form needs to be specified in lower case).
The predefined styles that contain sm in their name (for example long-sm-short) redefine \acronymfont to use \textsmaller.
The remaining predefined styles redefine \acronymfont{<text>} to simply do its argument <text>.
The following styles are supplied by the glossaries package:
With these three styles, acronyms are displayed in the form
on first use and
on subsequent use. They also set \acronymsort{<short>}{<long>} to just <short>. This means that the acronyms are sorted according to their short form. In addition, \acronymentry{<label>} is set to just the short form (enclosed in \acronymfont) and the description key is set to the long form.
These three styles are analogous to the above three styles, except the display order is swapped to
on first use.
Note, however, that \acronymsort and \acronymentry are the same as for the <long> (<short>) styles above, so the acronyms are still sorted according to the short form.
These are like the long-short, long-sc-short and long-sm-short styles described above, except that the description key must be supplied in the optional argument of \newacronym. They also redefine \acronymentry to {<long>} (\acronymfont{<short>}) and redefine \acronymsort{<short>}{<long>} to just <long>. This means that the acronyms are sorted according to the long form, and in the list of acronyms the name field has the long form followed by the short form in parentheses. I recommend you use a glossary style such as altlist with these acronym styles to allow for the long name field.
These styles are analogous to the above three styles, but the first use display style is:
The definitions of \acronymsort and \acronymentry are the same as those for long-short-desc etc.
These styles always display (via \gls) the long form regardless of whether the entry has been used or not. However, \acrfull and \glsentryfull will display <long> (\acronymfont{<short>}). In the case of dua, the name and sort keys are set to the short form and the description is set to the long form. In the case of dua-desc, the name and sort keys are set to the long form and the description is supplied in the optional argument of \newacronym.
These three styles set the first use display to:
However, \acrfull and \glsentryfull are set to \acronymfont{<short>} (<long>). (And similarly for plural and upper case forms.) On subsequent use the display is:
The sort and name keys are set to the short form, and the description is set to the long form.
These three styles are similar to the previous three styles, but the description has to be supplied in the optional argument of \newacronym. The name key is set to the long form followed by the short form in parentheses and the sort key is set to the long form. This means that the acronyms will be sorted according to the long form. In addition, since the name will typically be quite wide it’s best to choose a glossary style that can accommodate this, such as altlist.
Example 18 (Adapting a Predefined Acronym Style)
Suppose I want to use the footnote-sc-desc style, but I want the name key set to the short form followed by the long form in parentheses and the sort key set to the short form. Then I need to specify the footnote-sc-desc style:
and then redefine \acronymsort and \acronymentry:
(I’ve used \space for extra clarity, but you can just use an actual space instead.)
Since the default Computer Modern fonts don’t support bold smallcaps, I’m also going to redefine \acronymfont so that it always switches to medium weight to ensure the smallcaps setting is used:
This isn’t necessary if you use a font that supports bold smallcaps.
The sample file sampleFnAcrDesc.tex illustrates this example.
____________________________
You may find that the predefined acronyms styles that come with the glossaries package don’t suit your requirements. In this case you can define your own style using:
where <style name> is the name of the new style (avoid active characters). The second argument, <display>, is equivalent to the mandatory argument of \defglsentryfmt. You can simply use \glsgenacfmt or you can customize the display using commands like \ifglsused, \glsifplural and \glscapscase. (See §6.1 Changing the format of the link text for further details.) If the style is likely to be used with a mixed glossary (that is entries in that glossary are defined both with \newacronym and \newglossaryentry) then you can test if the entry is an acronym and use \glsgenacfmt if it is or \glsgenentryfmt if it isn’t. For example, the long-short style sets <display> as
(You can use \ifglshasshort instead of \ifglshaslong to test if the entry is an acronym if you prefer.)
The third argument, <definitions>, can be used to redefine the commands that affect the display style, such as \acronymfont or, if <display> uses \glsgenacfmt, \genacrfullformat and its variants.
Note that \setacronymstyle redefines \glsentryfull and \acrfullfmt to use \genacrfullformat (and similarly for the plural and upper case variants). If this isn’t appropriate for the style (as in the case of styles like footnote and dua) \newacronymstyle should redefine these commands within <definitions>.
Within \newacronymstyle’s <definitions> argument you can also redefine
This is a list of additional fields to be set in \newacronym. You can use the following token registers to access the entry label, long form and short form: \glslabeltok \glslabeltok, \glslongtok \glslongtok and \glsshorttok \glsshorttok. As with all TEX registers, you can access their values by preceding the register with \the. For example, the long-short style does:
which sets the description field to the long form of the acronym whereas the long-short-desc style does:
since the description needs to be specified by the user.
It may be that you want to define a new acronym style that’s based on an existing style. Within <display> you can use
to use the <display> definition from the style given by <style name>. Within <definitions> you can use
to use the <definitions> from the style given by <style name>. For example, the long-sc-short acronym style is based on the long-short style with minor modifications (remember to use ## instead of # within <definitions>):
(\glstextup \glstextup is used to cancel the effect of \textsc. This defaults to \textulc, if defined, otherwise \textup. For example, the plural of svm should be rendered as svms rather than svms.)
Example 19 (Defining a Custom Acronym Style)
Suppose I want my acronym on first use to have the short form in the text and the
long form with the description in a footnote. Suppose also that I want the
short form to be put in small caps in the main body of the document, but I
want it in normal capitals in the list of acronyms. In my list of acronyms, I
want the long form as the name with the short form in brackets followed
by the description. That is, in the text I want \gls on first use to display:
\textsc{<abbrv>}\footnote{<long>: <description>}
\textsc{<abbrv>}
<long> (<short>) <description>
Let’s suppose it’s possible that I may have a mixed glossary. I can check this in the second argument of \newacronymstyle using:
This will use \glsgenentryfmt if the entry isn’t an acronym, otherwise it will use \glsgenacfmt. The third argument (<definitions>) of \newacronymstyle needs to redefine \genacrfullformat etc so that the first use displays the short form in the text with the long form in a footnote followed by the description. This is done as follows (remember to use ## instead of #):
If you think it inappropriate for the short form to be capitalised at the start of a sentence you can change the above to:
Another variation is to use \Glsentrylong and \Glsentrylongpl in the footnote instead of \glsentrylong and \glsentrylongpl.
Now let’s suppose that commands such as \glsentryfull and \acrfull shouldn’t use a footnote, but instead use the format: <long> (<short>). This means that the style needs to redefine \glsentryfull, \acrfullfmt and their plural and upper case variants.
First, the non-linking commands:
Now for the linking commands:
(This may cause problems with long hyperlinks, in which case adjust the definitions so that, for example, only the short form is inside the argument of \glslink.)
The style also needs to redefine \acronymsort so that the acronyms are sorted according to the long form:
If you prefer them to be sorted according to the short form you can change the above to:
The acronym font needs to be set to \textsc and the plural suffix adjusted so that the “s” suffix in the plural short form doesn’t get converted to smallcaps:
There are a number of ways of dealing with the format in the list of acronyms. The simplest way is to redefine \acronymentry to the long form followed by the upper case short form in parentheses:
(I’ve used \Glsentrylong instead of \glsentrylong to capitalise the name in the glossary.)
An alternative approach is to set \acronymentry to just the long form and redefine \GenericAcronymFields to set the symbol key to the short form and use a glossary style that displays the symbol in parentheses after the name (such as the tree style) like this:
I’m going to use the first approach and set \GenericAcronymFields to do nothing:
Finally, this style needs to switch off hyperlinks on first use to avoid nested links:
Putting this all together:
Now I need to specify that I want to use this new style:
I also need to use a glossary style that suits this acronym style, for example altlist:
Once the acronym style has been set, I can define my acronyms:
The sample file sample-custom-acronym.tex illustrates this example.
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The list of acronyms is just like any other type of glossary and can be displayed on its own using:
(If you use the acronym package option you can also use
as a synonym for See §2.5 Acronym Options.)Alternatively the list of acronyms can be displayed with all the other glossaries using:
However, care must be taken to choose a glossary style that’s appropriate to your acronym style. Alternatively, you can define your own custom style (see §15.2 Defining your own glossary style for further details).
Users of the obsolete glossary package may recall that the syntax used to define new acronyms has changed with the replacement glossaries package. In addition, the old glossary package created the command \<acr-name> when defining the acronym <acr-name>.
In order to facilitate migrating from the old package to the new one, the glossaries package13.1 provides the command:
This uses the same syntax as the glossary package’s method of defining acronyms. It is
equivalent to:
\newacronym[<key-val list>]{<label>}{<abbrv>}{<long>}
The glossaries package doesn’t load the xspace package since there are both advantages and disadvantages to using \xspace in \<label>. If you don’t use the xspace package you need to explicitly force a space using \␣ (backslash space) however you can follow \<label> with additional text in square brackets (the final optional argument to \gls). If you use the xspace package you don’t need to escape the spaces but you can’t use the optional argument to insert text (you will have to explicitly use \gls).
To illustrate this, suppose I define the acronym “abc” as follows:
This will create the command \abc and its starred version \abc*. Table 13.2 illustrates the effect of \abc (on subsequent use) according to whether or not the xspace package has been loaded. As can be seen from the final row in the table, the xspace package prevents the optional argument from being recognised.
| Code | With xspace | Without xspace |
| \abc. | abc. | abc. |
| \abc xyz | abc xyz | abcxyz |
| \abc\ xyz | abc xyz | abc xyz |
| \abc* xyz | Abc xyz | Abc xyz |
| \abc[’s] xyz | abc [’s] xyz | abc’s xyz |
When using \gls, \glspl and their upper case variants it is possible that you may want to use the value given by the first key, even though you have already used the glossary entry. Conversely, you may want to use the value given by the text key, even though you haven’t used the glossary entry. The former can be achieved by one of the following commands:
while the latter can be achieved by one of the following commands:
You can also reset or unset all entries for a given glossary or list of glossaries using:
where <glossary list> is a comma-separated list of glossary labels. If omitted, all defined glossaries are assumed. For example, to reset all entries in the main glossary and the list of acronyms:
You can determine whether an entry’s first use flag is set using:
where <label> is the label of the required entry. If the entry has been used, <true part> will be done, otherwise <false part> will be done.
For example, the frame environment in beamer processes its argument for each overlay. This means that the first use flag will be unset on the first overlay and subsequent overlays will use the non-first use form.
Consider the following example:
On the first overlay, \gls{svm} produces “support vector machine (SVM)” and then unsets the first use flag. When the second overlay is processed, \gls{svm} now produces “SVM”, which is unlikely to be the desired effect. I don’t know anyway around this and the only suggestion I can give is to explicitly reset each acronym on first use:
This is non-optimal, but the beamer class is too complex for me to suggest an alternative solution.
The amsmath environments, such as align, also process their contents multiple times, but the glossaries package now checks for this.
Glossaries vary from lists that simply contain a symbol with a terse description to lists of terms or phrases with lengthy descriptions. Some glossaries may have terms with associated symbols. Some may have hierarchical entries. There is therefore no single style that fits every type of glossary. The glossaries package comes with a number of pre-defined glossary styles, described in §15.1 Predefined Styles. You can choose one of these that best suits your type of glossary or, if none of them suit your document, you can defined your own style (see §15.2 Defining your own glossary style).
The glossary style can be set using the style key in the optional argument to \printnoidxglossary (Option 1) or \printglossary (Options 2 and 3) or using the command:
(before the glossary is displayed).
Some of the predefined glossary styles may also be set using the style package option, it depends if the package in which they are defined is automatically loaded by the glossaries package.
The predefined styles can accommodate numbered level 0 (main) and level 1 entries. See the package options entrycounter, counterwithin and subentrycounter described in §2.3 Glossary Appearance Options. There is a summary of available styles in table 15.1.
| Style | Maximum Level | Homograph | Symbol |
| listdotted | 0 | ||
| sublistdotted | 1 | ||
| list* | 1 | ✓ | |
| altlist* | 1 | ✓ | |
| long*3col* | 1 | ✓ | |
| long4col* | 1 | ✓ | ✓ |
| altlong*4col* | 1 | ✓ | ✓ |
| long* | 1 | ✓ | |
| super*3col* | 1 | ✓ | |
| super4col* | 1 | ✓ | ✓ |
| altsuper*4col* | 1 | ✓ | ✓ |
| super* | 1 | ✓ | |
| *index* | 2 | ✓ | |
| treenoname* | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| *tree* | — | ✓ | |
| *alttree* | — | ✓ | |
| inline | 1 | ✓ |
The tabular-like styles that allow multi-line descriptions and page lists use the length \glsdescwidth \glsdescwidth to set the width of the description column and the length \glspagelistwidth \glspagelistwidth to set the width of the page list column.15.1 These will need to be changed using \setlength if the glossary is too wide. Note that the long4col and super4col styles (and their header and border variations) don’t use these lengths as they are designed for single line entries. Instead you should use the analogous altlong4col and altsuper4col styles. If you want to explicitly create a line-break within a multi-line description in a tabular-like style it’s better to use \newline instead of \\.
Note that if you use the style key in the optional argument to \printnoidxglossary (Option 1) or \printglossary (Options 2 and 3), it will override any previous style settings for the given glossary, so if, for example, you do
then the new definition of \glsgroupskip will not have an affect for this glossary, as \glsgroupskip is redefined by style=long. Likewise, \setglossarystyle will also override any previous style definitions, so, again
will reset \glsgroupskip back to its default definition for the named glossary style (long in this case). If you want to modify the styles, either use \newglossarystyle (described in the next section) or make the modifications after \setglossarystyle, e.g.:
As from version 3.03, you can now use the package option nogroupskip to suppress the gap between groups for the default styles instead of redefining \glsgroupskip.
All the styles except for the three- and four-column styles and the listdotted style use the command
after the description. This simply displays a full stop by default. To eliminate this full stop (or replace it with something else, say, a comma) you will need to redefine \glspostdescription before the glossary is displayed. Alternatively, you can suppress it for a given entry by placing \nopostdesc in the entry’s description.
As from version 3.03 you can now use the package option nopostdot to suppress this full stop.
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-list. Since they all use the description environment, they are governed by the same parameters as that environment. These styles all ignore the entry’s symbol. Note that these styles will automatically be available unless you use the nolist or nostyles package options.
which defaults to a vertical bar with a space on either side. For example, to simply have a space separating each group, do:
Note that the hyper-navigation line is now (as from version 1.14) set inside the optional argument to \item instead of after it to prevent a spurious space at the start. This can be changed by redefining \glossaryheader, but note that this needs to be done after the glossary style has been set.
governs where the description should start. This is a flat style, so child entries are formatted in the same way as the parent entries.
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-long. Since they all use the longtable environment, they are governed by the same parameters as that environment. Note that these styles will automatically be available unless you use the nolong or nostyles package options. These styles fully justify the description and page list columns. If you want ragged right formatting instead, use the analogous styles described in §15.1.3 Longtable Styles (Ragged Right).
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-longragged. These styles are analogous to those defined in glossary-long but the multiline columns are left justified instead of fully justified. Since these styles all use the longtable environment, they are governed by the same parameters as that environment. The glossary-longragged package additionally requires the array package. Note that these styles will only be available if you explicitly load glossary-longragged:
Note that you can’t set these styles using the style package option since the styles aren’t defined until after the glossaries package has been loaded.
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-super. Since they all use the supertabular environment, they are governed by the same parameters as that environment. Note that these styles will automatically be available unless you use the nosuper or nostyles package options. In general, the longtable environment is better, but there are some circumstances where it is better to use supertabular.15.3 These styles fully justify the description and page list columns. If you want ragged right formatting instead, use the analogous styles described in §15.1.5 Supertabular Styles (Ragged Right).
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-superragged. These styles are analogous to those defined in glossary-super but the multiline columns are left justified instead of fully justified. Since these styles all use the supertabular environment, they are governed by the same parameters as that environment. The glossary-superragged package additionally requires the array package. Note that these styles will only be available if you explicitly load glossary-superragged:
Note that you can’t set these styles using the style package option since the styles aren’t defined until after the glossaries package has been loaded.
The styles described in this section are all defined in the package glossary-tree. These styles are designed for hierarchical glossaries but can also be used with glossaries that don’t have sub-entries. These styles will display the entry’s symbol if it exists. Note that these styles will automatically be available unless you use the notree or nostyles package options.
The optional argument <level> indicates the level, where 0 indicates the top-most level, 1 indicates the first level sub-entries, etc. If \glssetwidest hasn’t been used for a given sub-level, the level 0 widest text is used instead. If <level> is omitted, 0 is assumed.
For each level, the name is placed to the left of the paragraph block containing the symbol (optional) and the description. If the symbol is present, it is placed in parentheses before the description.
The glossary-mcols package provides tree-like styles that are in the multicols environment (defined by the multicol package). The style names are as their analogous tree styles (as defined in §15.1.6 Tree-Like Styles) but are prefixed with “mcol”. For example, the mcolindex style is essentially the index style but put in a multicols environment. For the complete list, see table 15.2.
The default number of columns is 2, but can be changed by redefining
to the required number. For example, for a three column glossary:
This section covers the glossary-inline package that supplies the inline style. This is a style that is designed for in-line use (as opposed to block styles, such as lists or tables). This style doesn’t display the number list.
You will most likely need to redefine \glossarysection with this style. For example, suppose you are required to have your glossaries and list of acronyms in a footnote, you can do:
Where you need to include your glossaries as a footnote you can do:
The inline style is governed by the following:
This defaults to “; ” and is used between main (i.e. level 0) entries.
This defaults to “, ” and is used between sub-entries.
This defaults to “: ” and is used between a parent main entry and its first sub-entry.
This defaults to “; ” and is used at the end of the glossary.
If the predefined styles don’t fit your requirements, you can define your own style using:
where <name> is the name of the new glossary style (to be used in \setglossarystyle). The second argument <definitions> needs to redefine all of the following:
This environment defines how the main body of the glossary should be typeset. Note that this does not include the section heading, the glossary preamble (defined by \glossarypreamble) or the glossary postamble (defined by \glossarypostamble). For example, the list style uses the description environment, so the theglossary environment is simply redefined to begin and end the description environment.
This macro indicates what to do at the start of the main body of the glossary. Note that this is not the same as \glossarypreamble, which should not be affected by changes in the glossary style. The list glossary style redefines \glossaryheader to do nothing, whereas the longheader glossary style redefines \glossaryheader to do a header row.
This macro indicates what to do at the start of each logical block within the main body of the glossary. If you use makeindex the glossary is sub-divided into a maximum of twenty-eight logical blocks that are determined by the first character of the sort key (or name key if the sort key is omitted). The sub-divisions are in the following order: symbols, numbers, A, …, Z. If you use xindy, the sub-divisions depend on the language settings.
Note that the argument to \glsgroupheading is a label not the group title. The group title can be obtained via
This obtains the title as follows: if <label> consists of a single non-active character or <label> is equal to glssymbols or glsnumbers and \<label>groupname exists, this is taken to be the title, otherwise the title is just <label>. (The “symbols” group has the label glssymbols, so the command \glssymbolsgroupname is used, and the “numbers” group has the label glsnumbers, so the command \glsnumbersgrouptitle is used.) If you are using xindy, <label> may be an active character (for example ø), in which case the title will be set to just <label>. You can redefine \glsgetgrouptitle if this is unsuitable for your document.
A navigation hypertarget can be created using
For further details about \glsnavhypertarget, see the documented code (glossaries-code.pdf).
Most of the predefined glossary styles redefine \glsgroupheading to simply ignore its argument. The listhypergroup style redefines \glsgroupheading as follows:
See also \glsgroupskip below. (Note that command definitions within \newglossarystyle must use ##1 instead of #1 etc.)
This macro determines what to do after one logical group but before the header for the next logical group. The list glossary style simply redefines \glsgroupskip to be \indexspace, whereas the tabular-like styles redefine \glsgroupskip to produce a blank row.
As from version 3.03, the package option nogroupskip can be used to suppress this default gap for the predefined styles.