Create a Glossary in R Markdown

I was thinking about creating a glossary in bookdown and found out that there was already an issue about it. I like Yihui’s recommendation: use Pandoc’s definition lists.< !--more--> This was exactly what I had been doing, but I quickly found out that there was a major drawback – the definition lists won’t order alphabetically unless written in that way.

So I wrote an R function to reorder the definition lists written in R Markdown. Note that this functions only works for R Markdown files containing defintion lists exclusively. If the R Markdown files aren’t whole-definition-lists, the function will fail.

Usage

To order the definition lists alphabetically, simply put the Rmd file path in the function. To have a different output file, provide the output file path as the second argument.

sort_def_list("glossary.Rmd")
# sort_def_list("glossary.Rmd", "reordered.Rmd")

The output in PDF looks like this (I used the multicol package)¹:

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Last updated: 2018-10-24