Re: tooltips and glossary

[Michael Saunders <odradek5@gmail.com>]

Philipp:

Thank you---I appreciate your effort on glossarium.lua very much, but
I don't want to be dependent on you every time I want to tweek my
glossary.  I find it difficult to change the appearance and behavior
of anything in Context, but I think my chances are better with it than
with trying to work in lua.

So, I have pursued the problem via the \definesynonyms approach.  What
I have so far can do all the basic things I imagined, and only seems
to need some cosmetic work now.  This is what I have:

In the preamble:

\definesynonyms[gentry][gentries][\infull][\inshort]
%to connect headwords to entries
\definesynonyms[gloss][glosses][\tttext][\ttkey]
%to make short glosses available for tooltips
\def\gldef#1#2#3{\gloss{#1}{#2}\gentry{#1}{#3 {(p.\at[g:#1])}}}
\def\hint#1{\tooltip[middle]{#1}{\tttext{#1}}}
\def\glref#1{\reference[g:#1]{}}
%to place at a substantive reference in the text

%then you have a file of definitions like this one:
\gldef{vibrato}{a periodic fluctuation in pitch}{A periodic
fluctuation of pitch, typically in the range 6--12~Hz.}


Then, in the text, when you use an unfamiliar word and the reader
could benefit from a quick, pop-up gloss:

\hint{vibrato}  (I just need a more sophisticated version of this that
can deal with variants of the word).

And, when you are about to engage in a substantive discussion of a
word or phrase that appears in the glossary (for a given headword,
there might be zero, one, or several such points in the text):

\glref{vibrato}  (This causes a page reference after the glossary entry.)

I have two questions remaining:

1. I was somehow able to guess that \definesynonyms[gentry][gentries]
creates a new command called "\setupgentries[]", and I imagine this
command must inherit its possible keys and values from another
command, but I don't know what.  Where can I look it up?

2. How can I modify the appearance/location/behavior of tooltips?  I
tried \setuptooltips, but apparently that's not it.

I'll tinker with this and test it for a while.   Eventually I hope to
contribute a glossaries "my way" to the garden.


Hans:

No problem!  I'm sure whatever I put in the Google translator was just
as articulate as what came out of it.   Really, I think the mistake is
mine.  All along I have been assuming that Context was like LaTeX:  a
system for end-users, a language where an author could easily
manipulate the appearance of his document.  Apparently, it's more like
a supporting infrastructure for that.  Maybe it needs a layer of
macros sitting on top of it to make it accessible and friendly to
users/writers.  I'm hoping Idris's book will shed light on this.

Thanks, everyone.
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