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:

Text with abbreviations

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

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

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

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:

docs/example.md includes/abbreviations.md

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

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

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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. ↩