mkdocs-material/docs/reference/abbreviations.md

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Abbreviations

Technical documentation often incurs the usage of many acronyms, which may need additional explanation, especially for new user of your project. For these matters, Material for MkDocs uses a combination of Markdown extensions to enable site-wide glossaries.

Configuration

This configuration enables abbreviations and allows to build a simple project-wide glossary, sourcing definitions from a central location. Add the following line to mkdocs.yml:

markdown_extensions:
  - abbr
  - pymdownx.snippets

See additional configuration options:

• Abbreviations

• Snippets

Usage

Adding abbreviations

Abbreviations can be defined by using a special syntax similar to URLs and footnotes, starting with a * and immediately followed by the term or acronym to be associated in square brackets.

Example:

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language
*[W3C]: World Wide Web Consortium

Result:

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language *[W3C]: World Wide Web Consortium

Adding a glossary

The Snippets extension can be used to implement a simple glossary by moving all abbreviations in a dedicated file¹, and embedding it with the --8<-- notation at the end of each document.

Example:

=== ":octicons-file-code-16: docs/example.md"

```` markdown
The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

--8<-- "includes/abbreviations.md"
````

=== ":octicons-file-code-16: includes/abbreviations.md"

```` markdown
*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language
*[W3C]: World Wide Web Consortium
````

Result:

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

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1. It's highly recommended to put the Markdown file containing the abbreviations outside of the docs folder (here, a folder with the name includes is used), as MkDocs might otherwise complain about an unreferenced file. ↩︎