Creating a glossary

[chieflx]

Hi,

I am fairly new to OO but do have a reasonably understanding of word processing. However, I am stuck with a feature that I hope is available. I have searched the forums but had no luck so I wonder if anybody might be able to help/advise me.

I am writing a document that contains some technical words to do with animal behaviour and I would like to create a list of the those words to use as a glossary at the end of the document. Is it possible to 'mark' those words in anyway so that they will automatically appear on the glossary page for later editing?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions on how I could achieve this,

Regards
Rob

[acknak]

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

You can mark words to be included in an index. I don't know if there's any way to convert an index (word ... pages) into a glossary. I suppose you could always just copy/paste the words from the index and manually edit it into a glossary.

[chieflx]

Thanks acknak,
I thought copy and paste might be my best option. I was just being lazy really hoping to create the list automatically.

All the best
Rob

[acknak]

If you use Writer's index feature--mark each word in the text as belonging to a user-defined index, then Writer will build the index (collect all the marked words) for you. At that point, you can either edit the index to add the definitions, or (probably better) copy/paste the collected words to make the glossary.

My gut feeling is that that's a better process than simply copy/pasting each word to make the glossary purely by hand, but I can't give you a specific reason why it's better. It does preserve the marked key words in the text, which seems like a good idea, but I don't know of anything you could actually do with the marked words other than have Writer build the index from them.

[Ellsinore]

If you use Writer's index feature--mark each word in the text as belonging to a user-defined index, then Writer will build the index (collect all the marked words) for you. At that point, you can either edit the index to add the definitions, or (probably better) copy/paste the collected words to make the glossary.

My gut feeling is that that's a better process than simply copy/pasting each word to make the glossary purely by hand, but I can't give you a specific reason why it's better. It does preserve the marked key words in the text, which seems like a good idea, but I don't know of anything you could actually do with the marked words other than have Writer build the index from them.

I realize this is an old post, but I came across it because I'm trying to do the same thing -- automatically generate a glossary. The user-defined index seemed like a great idea -- and manually entering the definitions isn't a big deal -- but when it's updated, only the marked words remain. All of the definitions are gone.

I thought I might be able to modify a bibliography index for this purpose, and use the "notes" feature for the definitions, but it seems that you can only have one "Bibliography" index -- and while I guess that makes sense, it didn't help me solve my problem.

Has anyone found a workable solution for this?

[acknak]

I don't think Writer can help you with this. The index functions are meant to allow regenerating the index; when you do that, any manual changes are lost.

I suppose you could use the Insert > Indexes & Tables > Type: Alphabetical Index ... to generate a list of the marked words, copy/paste the words to a new document and create the glossary there, but I'm not sure that provides a big advantage over manually creating the glossary.

[Akram]

Another way to collect words is to create a custom dictionary. You can then open the .dic wordbook file, which appears to be plain text and is sorted alphabetically, and take it from there. I tried to see if it was possible to have a dynamic link to the .dic file, say OLE or DDE, from the source document, but it didn't work. It would have been amusing if it had.

[mfaris01]

Hi,

I know this is an older post, but as I was looking for something, I stumbled across this tip. It works, although it is still a manual process.

http://www.legroom.net/2009/05/01/defin ... ice-writer

I hope this helps!

Mike...

[Ellsinore]

Hi,
I know this is an older post, but as I was looking for something, I stumbled across this tip. It works, although it is still a manual process.
http://www.legroom.net/2009/05/01/defin ... ice-writer

Hi, Mike! Yes, it is a bit of an old post, but I never did resolve the situation. Too many irons in the fire and just moved on to easier stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll be checking it out! Thanks!