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What is the best way in Vim to handle abbreviations for a paper? For example:

When working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) there must be .... and furthermore AI enables you to....

And later in the paper exists an appendix:

List of Abbreviations

....
AI - Artificial Intelligence
DoD - Department of Defense
....

The goal would be to write in Vim something simply like:

When working with \acronym{AI} there must be .... and furthermore \acronym{AI} enables you to

And it would correctly define the acronym on first usage and generate the list of acronyms / abbreviations when called, much like a bibliography. Is there a way to accomplish this?

statox
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Diesel
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  • Can you clarify a bit the expected behavior? it would correctly define the Acronym on first usage and generate the list of acronyms when called So you want to write the list of abbreviations manually, when using the abbreviation you want to have the complete sentence inserted on the first use and then you want to keep just the short form, right? What I don't understand is the the second part where it generate the list of acronyms when called: Isn't the list supposed to be written before you try to use an abbreviation? What is it supposed to generate? – statox Mar 15 '22 at 15:22
  • @statox Yep! Exactly right on the first part. It's annoying when adding an acronym early in the paper to check if it was used before. The second part is a nice to have. Many reports, especially those that heavily use abbreviations, will have an appendix (normally after, sometimes before). This appendix defines all the acronyms used in the paper so that you don't have to search for the first usage. For example in this publication https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_0ch1.pdf on page GL-1 or 205 of the pdf you will see a list. – Diesel Mar 15 '22 at 15:38
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    I understand how such a list would be useful but I don't understand how your code would generate it: If you want your snippets to be able to replace an abbreviation by its full version it means that you need to already have this list, right? Then how would your code generate such a list since it doesn't have the data ? – statox Mar 15 '22 at 15:51
  • As for the actual solution maybe you can choose one snippet engine plugin, have a script which would parse your existing list of definitions and replace your text. Making sure the long form is used only on the first occurrence might not be trivial but doable. – statox Mar 15 '22 at 15:53
  • That is why I initially listed this as a plugin. I have a feeling nothing like this has been implemented to do part 1 or part 2. Thank you for the last comment above, I'll look more into that. – Diesel Mar 15 '22 at 15:56
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    …Use LaTeX? Which has a package that does this well? (I have \usepackage[nopostdot,toc,acronym,nomain,nonumberlist]{glossaries}, {\makeglossaries}, \loadglsentries[acronym]{glossary} in my thesis, where glossary.tex uses \newacronym to define them and I refer to them with, e.g., \gls{acronym}) – D. Ben Knoble Mar 15 '22 at 21:26
  • @D.BenKnoble That's what I was looking for. I didn't know that existed. – Diesel Mar 16 '22 at 00:04

1 Answers1

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Indeed, you will need some vimscript code to get what you want.

I wrote this small snippet which does what you are looking for (I think):

function FindAcronyms()
    let view = winsaveview()
    call cursor(1, 1)

while search('(\zs[A-Z]\+\ze)', 'W')
    " Getting the accronym and its definition
    let line_content = getline('.')
    let accronym = matchstr(line_content[col('.')-1:], '^[A-Z]\+\ze)')
    let number_of_words = len(accronym)
    let definition = matchstr(line_content[:col('.')-2], '\(\w\+\s*\)\{'.number_of_words.'\}\ze($')

    " Verifying that the accronym corresponds to the definition
    let cnt = 0
    let valid = 1
    let words_array = split(definition)
    while cnt < number_of_words
        if tolower(words_array[cnt][0]) != tolower(accronym[cnt])
            let valid = 0
        endif
        let cnt = cnt + 1
    endwhile


    if !valid | continue | endif

    " Verifying that the accronym is not yet present in the document
    if search('^\s*' . accronym . '\s*:', 'n') | continue | endif

    " Adding the definition at the end of the document
    call append(line('$'), accronym . ': ' . definition)
endwhile

call winrestview(view)



endfunction

When calling this function, all of the acronyms of the form "[...] here is Some Definition (SD) [...]" will be added to the end of the document

Zorzi
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  • If anyone else sees this I was simply looking for the glossaries package as @D.BenKnoble pointed out. I didn't know that was a thing. – Diesel Mar 24 '22 at 15:27