Short glossary items as footnotes?

[davidg-sil]

In #604 I suggested a 'just once' flag for including glossary items as footnotes. I would like to also / alternatively suggest that there could be an option for "If less than N words". This would allow short glossary items to appear as a footnotes, but be a bit cleverer about which ones. There might also be a flag that said short glossary entries that are converted to footnotes don't appear in the glossary.

An alternative approach might be to allow glossary items to be categorised by the user with milestones or \cat to flag how the entry should be handled.

[markpenny]

I know that a number of years ago people were keen to have GLO items in cutouts near the occurrence in the text. How could we achieve that? (i.e. instead of turning GLO items into footnotes, we display them as a cut-out).

I agree that we need to suppress duplicates - even if we said, "once per book" rather than once per page, that would be adequate, and would presumably be relatively easy to pull off in the python code.

[mhosken]

Sounds like a whole little UI and some regex foo or even a full parsed doc process to identify glossary items and turn them into whatever (foonote/sidebar) and limit their occurrence (1 per book/chapter/etc.)

This seems something we do entirely in the python.