Scripts for glossary entries?

[PeterKC]

In a document with a glossary, there are two labor-intensive but very repetitive tasks:

1) Making the word (in the glossary) as an anchor (= the word or term), so it can be the target of a hyperlink elsewhere in the text.

2) Finding instance of each glossary word in the main text and applying a hyperlink to it.

Since these are highly repetitive tasks, has anyone developed a script or scripts?

[CC 2017]

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Hi,

It's a glossary!

Could you show a page?

(^/)

[PeterKC]

Here's a glossary page. The word or term has a nested character style and is demarcated by the space followed by en dash. (The definitions, obviously, are minimal, for school students.)

Online, I can make the definition pop up if the user hovers over the word in the text, or link to the glossary page.

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Peter,

What final use?

When you click on the word in the current text, you want to have a pop-up? …

or do you want to jump to the concerned glossary page?

(^/)

[PeterKC]

This document will be published as a PDF.  (A few will probably print it, but that's not the intent.) It is not necessary to have a popup text when a user hovers on the word, but it would be a plus — if easy to do.

The same text & images will be used online, but pagination and some other formatting elements are too different to do it as an export from ID.

I should have said that a tech colleague says it's easy to have a pop-up definition on the website, but I don't know that myself.

[PeterKC]

Oops — I talked about 'hovering' but you asked about clicking on a word in the text. Same basic answer —a popup could be a plus — but I was planning on it taking the user to the correct place in the glossary section.

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Peter,

Last comment: Do you work on a single ID file or a book with several ID files?

[Have you already found a way to fix your issue?]

(^/)

[PeterKC]

I am the only person working on this file during this phase of the project. I may turn it over to someone else next month.

I don't have any way to create all the anchors and hyperlinks efficiently; I think I could create a script or two to do it, but I've never scripted InDesign before — I was hoping someone had already done a script or scripts that would only require a little modification to use on this.

[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Peter,

As I see on the screenshot [post#2], the page shown covers letters "E" to "O", that means 11 letters on 26!!

Is the glossary only running on 3 pages with ~ 80-90 entries! If we suppose 3-5 links per entry, we have a 240-450 range!

Manually doable!? 1-2 work days (working cool! and not too fast to avoid errors) 

(^/)