At the risk of sounding overly pedantic and drawing attention to my own failings…
“Acronyms” are defined as:
words formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as they are spelled, not as separate letters.
Examples include “laser”, “scuba” and “NATO”.
“Initialisms” are defined as:
abbreviations which consist of the initial (i.e. first) letters of words and which are pronounced as separate letters when they are spoken.
Examples include “BBC” and “CD”.
To add to the fun, we also have “contractions”, which are defined as:
a type of abbreviation in which letters from the middle of the word are omitted.
(such as “Dr” or “Mr”) and “shortenings”, which are defined as:
abbreviations in which the beginning or end of the word has been dropped.
(such as “rhino” or “cello”).
These are all sub-categories of abbreviations, but in the TeX world many of us seem to be using “acronym” as a synonym for “abbreviation”. This isn't helped by packages such as glossaries
— mea culpa. (As a writer whose first language is English, I hang my head in shame.) I've tried to address this with glossaries-extra
, which treats acronyms as specific types of abbreviations.
This misuse of the term actually dates as far back as LaTeX 2.09, and I suspect this is like the guillemet/guillemot issue that once established is hard to rectify, but given how pedantic we can be about typesetting and the use of semantically correct commands I think we ought to exercise some pedantry with our tags.
The acronyms tag is currently defined as
{acronyms} is about formatting acronyms and abbreviations using customized commands or specific packages like acronym or {glossaries}.
The abbreviations tag is currently just a synonym for acronyms.
Should we make abbreviations as the main tag for general abbreviations with acronyms redirecting to abbreviations?
Suggested description:
{abbreviations} is about formatting abbreviations (such as acronyms or initialisms) using customized commands or specific packages like acronym, acro or {glossaries}.
Alice and Bob Scenario 1
Alice asks a question with a MWE that contains
blah \textsc{abc} blah
Bob: btw don't use \textsc
, define \newcommand{\acronym}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
and use \acronym{abc}
Alice: it's an initialism not an acronym.
Bob: "acronym" is a commonly-used term.
Alice: I commonly see people use \textsc
so why can't I?
Bob: That's different.
Heated argumentdiscussion ensues.
Alice and Bob Scenario 2
Alice asks a question with a MWE that contains
blah \textsc{abc} blah
Bob: btw don't use \textsc
, define \newcommand{\acronym}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
and use \acronym{abc}
Alice: it's an initialism not an acronym.
Bob: yes, see acronyms and abbreviations. Use \initialism
instead.
LaTeX conversation resumes.
\acro
as a convenient indicator for how a string should be presented; an intentional oversimplification.):-)
but I agree that it is convenient to use commands like\acro
. I don't think most people would intuitively guess that, say,\init
meant an initialism and something like\abbrv
is too general.<acronym>
element from HTML5, and leave both acronyms and abbreviations under the<abbr>
element (an abbreviation itself).\textsc
fonts too "inconspicuous" for this purpose. (the only approximately x-height small caps font i know of that is distinct from regular text is the one used by "the economist"; wonderful design!) so instead, for tugboat, we use scaled-down caps, thus, a reader can tell the difference. that's what i meant by "presented" in my earlier comment.acronyms
andabbreviations
tags both synonymous with theduck
tag :-) That will be more fun.