PR available here:

https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf/pull/210

Thanks to Brian Van Klaveren for helping to improve the implementation.

Per my comment on GitHub — I have no argument with the code here, but I don't think this functionality is actually meaningful.

I disagree, I am producing a large number of test documents that have the acronyms table.

From my understanding talking to Wil O'Mullane this is better than having the glossary.

Well, I guess it depends what you're asking for here.

The ticket asks that only acronyms should be included in the acronyms table. As written, the code does not achieve that goal. Further, I can't see any way to achieve that goal given the approach that you have taken.

If you have chosen to recast the ticket as “include only items in block capitals in the acronyms table”, then this code seems fine. I don't think that's a useful thing to do, but if you assure me that's what you & Wil O'Mullane want, then I won't block you from merging it. (Although I would appreciate an explanation as to why you think it's useful, because it sure beats me!)

I would request that you add a comment explaining what the regexp is intended to achieve (in particular, the thinking behind the lookahead assertion isn't obvious to me).

I agree that to be coherent, we shall define in the glossarydefs.csv which entry is an acronym and which is a glossary definition.

The unused fields in the CSV file Documentation Tags could be used for that purpose, or a new field could be added. The number of entries to characterize should not be a big deal, I can do it. Maintaining the information should also not be a problem since each change needs to be reviewed. Of course, the logic in generateAcronyms.py would need a few bigger changes.

Producing automatically a large number of test documents including glossary definitions looks repetitive, unnecessary and just makes the documents bigger. Definitions are already available in the applicable documents.

Having a compact list of abbreviations fits better the scope of the test specifications and test plans and reports.

Maybe, as you suggest, I should update the issues, asking to include instead, an Abbreviations table at the end of the document, where abbreviation are strings defined as follows:

• contain only upper case characters, numbers and "/"s
• starting with an upper case character or a number
• can't be composed only by numbers

Note also that, as per https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf/blob/master/bin/generateAcronyms.py#L352, I am just reusing (and improving, in master uses only upper cases characters) the definition of acronym-like strings, made originally in the script. If this is not a valid definition anymore, the script should be reviewed.

I thought master looks for upper case characters that match the regex and ALSO forms a special regex based on the supplied acronyms that are not just made of upper case characters.

https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf/blob/master/bin/generateAcronyms.py#L42

CAP_ACRONYM = re.compile(r"\b[A-Z][A-Z]+\b")

Just 2 or more upper case characters.

Yes, but I'm talking about https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf/blob/master/bin/generateAcronyms.py#L344

That's the list of defined entries in glossarydefs.csv+myacronyms-skipacronyms.It is used to find all the matches between the glossary definitions and what is used.

The regular expression I am referring to, is used on line 352 to find all potential acronyms-like strings (as per line 349) in the text. And it is looking on only full uppercase strings.

From the difference with the matches, the missing ones are found.

I have checked this for both glossary and acronyms and it looks good. One small comment on github was fixed. There is still one comment from Tim on the regexp.. it could perhaps be simplified but I would not delay much on merging this. It is an improvement and it is good to flag acronyms separately to glossary entries.