Abbreviations and Acronyms

DokuWiki can mark abbreviations and acronyms (terminology) automatically. If your browser supports the <acronym> tag, you can hover your mouse on an abbreviation to see a short explanation (as tooltip).

Examples: HTML, RSS, XML

Dokuwiki's standard abbreviations are stored in the conf/acronyms.conf file. You can add your own abbreviations by creating a conf/acronyms.local.conf file and placing your abbreviations in that file. The same syntax as in the smileys configuration applies.

It is possible to modify Dokuwiki's conf/acronyms.conf file, however this could result in your changes being overwritten when upgrading Dokuwiki.

Please note that DokuWiki uses the <acronym> instead of the <abbr> tag. This is due to some limitations in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A detailed description on the difference between those tags can be found at Lars Holst's Website.

External Resources in case if you encounter an unknown acronym:

An unattributed source wrote β€œIt appears that this file must contain the acronyms in ASCII-betical order and it is only read when a page is edited (so new definitions won't show up in a page until it is modified).”
This is incorrect. Acronyms don't need to be in any particular order. For details on why the acronym may not show up immediately see caching. To force them to show up see purging the cache. β€” Christopher Smith 2005-10-28 02:57

> Two small questions that I would like to see added to the doc:

* are the words in the acronyms.local.conf case sensitive ?
* suppose you have defined a word, will it be picked up if there's a comma or period behind it ?

A Request, It should be possible for the users of the wiki to add entries to the abbreviation list. Today only people with write permission on the web server (admin?) can log in and changed the conf file so to put new entries in there.