List of Acronyms / Abbreviations for a paper

Question

What is the best way in Vim to handle abbreviations for a paper? For example:

When working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) there must be .... and furthermore AI enables you to....

And later in the paper exists an appendix:

List of Abbreviations

....
AI - Artificial Intelligence
DoD - Department of Defense
....

The goal would be to write in Vim something simply like:

When working with \acronym{AI} there must be .... and furthermore \acronym{AI} enables you to

And it would correctly define the acronym on first usage and generate the list of acronyms / abbreviations when called, much like a bibliography. Is there a way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Indeed, you will need some vimscript code to get what you want.

I wrote this small snippet which does what you are looking for (I think):

function FindAcronyms()
    let view = winsaveview()
    call cursor(1, 1)

    while search('(\zs[A-Z]\+\ze)', 'W')
        " Getting the accronym and its definition
        let line_content = getline('.')
        let accronym = matchstr(line_content[col('.')-1:], '^[A-Z]\+\ze)')
        let number_of_words = len(accronym)
        let definition = matchstr(line_content[:col('.')-2], '\(\w\+\s*\)\{'.number_of_words.'\}\ze($')

        " Verifying that the accronym corresponds to the definition
        let cnt = 0
        let valid = 1
        let words_array = split(definition)
        while cnt < number_of_words
            if tolower(words_array[cnt][0]) != tolower(accronym[cnt])
                let valid = 0
            endif
            let cnt = cnt + 1
        endwhile


        if !valid | continue | endif

        " Verifying that the accronym is not yet present in the document
        if search('^\s*' . accronym . '\s*:', 'n') | continue | endif

        " Adding the definition at the end of the document
        call append(line('$'), accronym . ': ' . definition)
    endwhile

    call winrestview(view)
endfunction

---

When calling this function, all of the acronyms of the form "[...] here is Some Definition (SD) [...]" will be added to the end of the document