Glossary gets tricked by a list of abbreviations

[Andy Johnstone]

Hi team,

I’ve stumbled across an interesting quirk in glossary.

Where I had three terms in a list like: ABC, DEF, GHI. Only the centre term was picked up by the glossary.

Switching the order of the terms changed the term which was found.

Fun eh?

Andy

[Adrian Support]

Hi Andy,

Aware of some issues with terms in that EA appears not to do a refresh as it adds terms to the model, i.e. it is caching them and so they do not appear in the database immediately. We think we have a workaround but want to test to ensure reliable; if so this will be included in an update.

Hence interested in your case – so to check the exact sequence events – let me sumarise:
1. You open (new?) model
2. Add 3 terms ABC, DEF, GHI
Questions 1:
– if you run eaDocX only DEF is output?

Question 2:
– if you close the project and reopen do all three terms exist in the EA glossary window
– and ii) if so do they all output OK with eaDocX

Thanks
Adrian

eaDocX tech support

[Andy Johnstone]

Good morning Adrian,

I think this must be different set of circumstances.

The information has been in the project glossary for a long time, 12 months or more.

Within the document, there is a word table.

A single cell contains a list of abbreviations: ABC, DEF, GHI

When I update the document in eaDocX only the term DEF is found and appears in the generated glossary.

If I change the sequence of the abbreviations to: DEF, GHI, ABC, now only GHI appears in the glossary.

I’ve just tried changing the content in the document so that there are a lot more words in that single cell, now two out of three out of four possible glossary items have been picked up…

I’ll see if I can generate a simple example.

[Andy Johnstone]

Here we go.

The cell contains a row of words with no separators…

Bail CCTV CGTF Charge CIB

The values CCTV, CGTF and Charge have been selected, Bail and CIB have been missed.

Hence it’s looking like the first word, and last word (of a set of words in a cell) are being skipped by the routine.

Andy

[eadocX Support]

This is a strange one.
We fixed a bug with the glossary which was picking up abbreviations which were inside other words – e.g if ‘IBBL’ was in the glossary, and you had the word ‘Wibble’ in the document, then the ‘IBBL’ term would print – clearly wrong.
So, we changed the glossary generator to look for spaces before an after the term.
BUT,
it seems like this is missing out terms which SHOULD be there! e.g. when your document contains ‘IBBL.’
Looks like we’ll have to have another go at this, as people seem to be finding auto-Glossaries useful.

[Andy Johnstone]

Ah! I can see the problem, words at the beginning and end of sentences won’t have a leading or trailing space…

It is a very useful function. I’m using for documents which have no other EA content, but the glossary.

:laugh:

[Andy Johnstone]

The work-around is simple, add a space before the first word, and it is picked up!

[eadocX Support]

I agree with your work-around – thanks.

..But it’s still a bit of a fiddle…
So..
I think I may have fixed the problem properly, by choosing different parameters on the MS Word ‘find’: the fix is in v3.2 which is due out in Beta in the next few days.

[Author]

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