New Feature: Easy Abbreviation

Posted on: 25 May 2021

Thanks to the great tutorial developed by first time contributor Erik Schill and edited by Simon Bray, we noticed that they defined a number of abbreviations and re-used those throughout their tutorial.

As the GTN is intended to be easy for contributors and easy for learners, we wanted to make use of the <abbr> tag which allows you to define commonly re-used terms in your HTML. However this is a bit clumsy to write every time, so we’ve implemented a tag and some metadata which permits easily defining and referencing abbreviations throughout your text.

In your tutorial metadata you can add an abbreviations section like:

---
title: My awesome tutorial
...
abbreviations:
  API: Application Programming Interface
  JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
---

And in your text you can use braces to refer to the term

code-in Input: Markdown

The `/jobs` {API} will return {JSON}. When we call the {API} we'll get back this result {JSON}.

code-out Output

The /jobs Application Programming Interface (API) will return JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). When we call the API we’ll get back this result JSON.

These will even generate an automatic Glossary at the end. Check out the use of this new feature in the BioBlend Dev Tutorial!