Lots of acronyms (Was: Nitpicky little style question)

["Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>]

Al Geist said:
>
> As for habits and readers....if you call a radio button an "Fred's
> Folly," provide a definition and use the term consistently throughout
> your documentation, I don't think the readers would be lost in cyberspace.
>

This is a point of curiosity to me. I have seen some technical documentation
that was absolutely awash with defined terms and acronyms - on an some pages
I would count 50 or even 100 such items.

Obviously, where the documentation is paper, not much can be done to help
the user understand the meaning of those terms except to provide an
excellent index and glossary. But for electronic documentation, in principle
every last occurrence of those defined terms and acronyms could be
hyperlinked back to where its meaning is defined, so the real meaning is no
more then a mouse click away.

Does anybody work with documentation that is like this, and do you make any
attempt to hyperlink acronyms and definitions?

Regards
Jonathan West


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