Adding an Interactive Glossary to your PDF

Jargon-filled, hard-to-understand documents can affect a community’s reputation for being citizen-friendly and continue the path of only engaging with the usual suspects.

Our glossary feature allows you to add help text popups over every instance of common jargon words or acronyms, adding clarity to your documents for the average visitor.

How it works: 

To create a glossary, you'll upload a spreadsheet in CSV format with two columns as demonstrated below.

• The first column contains defined terms (those will be underlined when found in your PDFs).
• The second column contains the definition that appears in the tooltip.

Jargon	Special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand. "legal jargon"
Acronym	An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word (e.g.ASCII,NASA).
Legalese	The formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand. "the typed pages were full of confusing legalese"
Stepback	For the purposes of measuring a second-story stepback where required, each plane of the façade should be independently considered to determine the relevant stepback for that portion of the building.

You'll upload this to your document by opening the editing tab and finding the upload field for Glossary Tooltips

Sample Glossary on Google Drive

Best Practices: 

• Choose the singular form of a word.
  • Select Bike to have your definition appear for bike and bikes.
• Avoid common words that appear everywhere in your header or footer and even your body with common words like:
  • Lot
  • City
  • Development 
  • Council 
  • ETC
• Check your work by skimming your document and adjusting the CSV file if needed.