robert-strandh / CL-reference

Reference manual for the Common Lisp programming language.
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How should the glossary be organized? #4

Open robert-strandh opened 9 years ago

robert-strandh commented 9 years ago

I think the reference manual needs a glossary.

But I want the glossary to be better than that of the HyperSpec. I often find myself looking at a glossary entry in the HyperSpec as a result of having clicked on a link in an entry for some operator, but then I am "stuck" on that glossary entry, because there is no link from it to a section that explains the concept in detail.

As an example of what I am referring to, take for example a page such as ADJUST-ARRAY. Observe that the argument named ELEMENT-TYPE is specified to be a TYPE SPECIFIER and that TYPE SPECIFIER is a link. Clicking on that link, one ends up in the glossary entry for TYPE SPECIFIER as is appropriate. But it would be good to have a link from the glossary entry that goes to section 4.2.3 that discusses in more detail what a type specifier is.

In my latest experiment, I used the HYPERREF LaTeX package and turned the word ATOM into a link to the SECTION that takes about atoms. What I would really like to do is to introduce an indirection through the glossary. In other words, I would like each glossary entry to have a label, and I would like the link on ATOM to refer to that label. Then I want the glossary entry to contain a link to the section on ATOMs, with a text such as: "for more information on the type ATOM, see section...".

I don't think I have ever created a glossary in a document like this, so I need to figure it out, unless someone else has the time to do so. It is important that each entry can be associated with a label so that it can be linked to.