glossary.collection string glossary.collection Name of the glossary collection file Glossaries maintained independently across a set of documents are likely to become inconsistent unless considerable effort is expended to keep them in sync. It makes much more sense, usually, to store all of the glossary entries in a single place and simply extract the ones you need in each document. That's the purpose of the glossary.collection parameter. To setup a global glossary database, follow these steps: First, create a stand-alone glossary document that contains all of the entries that you wish to reference. Make sure that each glossary entry has an ID. Here's an example glossary: EricRaymond Just some test data 0 Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter `O' (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom /O is a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's monumental "A History of Mathematical Notations" notes that it was used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse this arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower left. And yet another convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet? 1TBS n The "One True Brace Style" indent style ]]> That takes care of the glossary database, now you have to get the entries into your document. Unlike bibliography entries, which can be empty, creating placeholder glossary entries would be very tedious. So instead, support for glossary.collection relies on implicit linking. In your source document, simply use firstterm and glossterm to identify the terms you wish to have included in the glossary. The stylesheets assume that you will either set the baseform attribute correctly, or that the content of the element exactly matches a term in your glossary. If you're using a glossary.collection, don't make explicit links on the terms in your document. So, in your document, you might write things like this: This is dummy text, without any real meaning. The point is simply to reference glossary terms like 0 and the One True Brace Style (1TBS). The 1TBS, as you can probably imagine, is a nearly religious issue.]]> If you set the firstterm.only.link parameter, only the terms marked with firstterm will be links. Otherwise, all the terms will be linked. The glossary itself has to be identified for the stylesheets. For lack of a better choice, the role is used. To identify the glossary as the target for automatic processing, set the role to auto. The title of this glossary (and any other information from the glossaryinfo that's rendered by your stylesheet) will be displayed, but the entries will come from the database. Unfortunately, the glossary can't be empty, so you must put in at least one glossentry. The content of this entry is irrelevant, it will not be rendered: Irrelevant If you can see this, the document was processed incorrectly. Use the glossary.collection parameter. ]]> What about glossary divisions? If your glossary database has glossary divisions and your automatic glossary contains at least one glossdiv, the automic glossary will have divisions. If the glossdiv is missing from either location, no divisions will be rendered. Glossary entries (and divisions, if appropriate) in the glossary will occur in precisely the order they occur in your database. Finally, when you are ready to format your document, simply set the glossary.collection parameter (in either a customization layer or directly through your processor's interface) to point to your global glossary. The stylesheets will format the glossary in your document as if all of the entries implicilty referenced appeared there literally.