Wikipediaise is a Visual Tools for Office addin (VSTO) developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 as an addin for Microsoft Word. It is written in C#. It was designed to hyperlink acronyms and jargon to Wikipedia.
I do a lot of technical documentation for my work, and the IT industry being what it is, the documents end up with a ridiculous number of acronyms. To make life easier, we usually put an abbreviation section at the top of the document, but this is a time consuming process to go thru every time, so I automated it. Additionally I added another method which will seek out the first occurrence of an abbreviation or acronym, and hyperlink it. First I will describe how this works, then how to use and customize the functionality.
Initially Wikipedia was used as the reference point, as it is an excellent reference point for technical information. After a while it became clear that many acronyms were better documented elsewhere, or in internal company documents, so I added the ability to use alternative reference sources.
Note that although I refer to acronyms, the addin is good for jargon and technical terms as well.
The following images show a before and after shot of a simple document, additionally it shows the document with an acronym table inserted at the top.
Figure 1 - Before shot of a Word document with acronyms and jargon to be hyperlinked
Figure 2 - The same document after it has been hyperlinked
Figure 3 - The same document, hyperlinked, and with an acronym table inserted at the beginning
The application comes with an embedded XML file with a set of pre-defined acronyms. This serves as an example only. The application will look in the %mydocuments% folder for a file called wikipediaise.dic. If this file exists it will override the embedded file, so the application can be customized for most requirements.
There are two elements available in the wikipediaise.dic file shown below.
Table 1 - Elements available in wikipediaise.dic
Element Description Comment excludeStyle Lists a Word style to be excluded from the process This could be a built in style or a user defined style. If a word is in this style it will not be hyperlinked. entry Contains a mandatory key term that will be searched for. Optional attributes will be described later. This text will be searched for in a case sensitive manner. If the term is found in the middle of a word, it will still be matched. For this reason, position longer superset acronyms earlier e.g. place https before http
Element
Description
Comment
excludeStyle
Lists a Word style to be excluded from the process
This could be a built in style or a user defined style. If a word is in this style it will not be hyperlinked.
entry
Contains a mandatory key term that will be searched for. Optional attributes will be described later.
This text will be searched for in a case sensitive manner. If the term is found in the middle of a word, it will still be matched. For this reason, position longer superset acronyms earlier e.g. place https before http
The excludeStyle element has no attributes, so just looks like this
Figure 4 - excludeStyle element example
The entry element has attributes, these are described below.
Attribute name Mandatory Description Comment key Yes The term that will be searched for and hyperlinked. Case sensitive. position longer superset acronyms earlier e.g. place https before http wikipediaEntry No This attribute is only used for entries in Wikipedia where the page name is not the same as the attribute. E.g. the entry in Wikipedia for Apache has a page name of Apache_HTTP_Server description No This will be used as a tooltip when a hyperlink is created in Word. It will also be used in the acronym table if that feature is used, url No This is an alternative URL if Wikipedia is not to be the source of reference.
Attribute name
Mandatory
key
Yes
The term that will be searched for and hyperlinked.
Case sensitive. position longer superset acronyms earlier e.g. place https before http
wikipediaEntry
No
This attribute is only used for entries in Wikipedia where the page name is not the same as the attribute. E.g. the entry in Wikipedia for Apache has a page name of Apache_HTTP_Server
description
This will be used as a tooltip when a hyperlink is created in Word. It will also be used in the acronym table if that feature is used,
url
This is an alternative URL if Wikipedia is not to be the source of reference.
Table 2 - entry element attributes
© Copyright 2008 Mark Focas newtelligence dasBlog 2.0.7226.0 | Page rendered at Saturday, November 22, 2008 12:27:12 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)
