Use of glossaries involves three steps:

First, you create a glossary document using the Glossary Editor. Each glossary document contains a list of terms and definitions, where the definitions are attachments to which the terms link. You can also specify a tooltip for each definition link, along with conditions describing markup of each term (match whole word and match case). Using the Glossary Editor, you can add, edit, and delete terms. You can also create multiple glossary documents and use them for different parts of your content.

You next assign one or more glossaries to your content using the Properties toolpane. You can assign glossaries in this way from the Library, Outline Editor, and Web Page Editor. In addition, in the Outline Editor and Topic Editor, you can use property inheritance to ensure that the appropriate glossary is automatically assigned to children created under a parent document to which a glossary has been assigned. Glossaries can be assigned only to modules, sections, topics, and web pages.

The final step in using glossaries is glossary markup, or updating glossary links, which can be done from the Glossary Editor, Library, and Outline Editor. When you update glossary links, the Developer searches the text in your content for occurrences of glossary terms. When it finds a term that matches the selected markup conditions (match whole word and match case), it creates a link to the attachment specified as the definition link. By default, when a glossary term appears multiple times in one location, only the first instance of the term is marked as a glossary link. You can also change the glossary default settings to have all occurrences of all terms marked as glossary links.

If you later make any changes to a glossary, to glossary assignments, or to text containing glossary terms, you must update the links again.

Glossary markup affects text in frame bubbles in topics, including Introduction and End frames, and text in web pages. However, if a glossary term is included in the text of a manually created bubble text link or web page hyperlink, no additional glossary link is created during glossary markup. That is, text used in manually created links is skipped during glossary markup. For example, suppose that a frame bubble in a topic contains the text "Save this file to your local disk." and you create a link from the phrase "local disk" to a web page attachment. Further suppose that the glossary assigned to this topic contains the term "disk" with a different attachment as its definition link. If you then update the glossary links for the topic, the original link to the web page is left intact, and no glossary link is created from the word "disk" to the definition link attachment.

Note that document names, package files, and templates are all excluded from glossary markup.

When you publish your content to Player outputs, glossary terms appearing in bubble text in topic frames or web page text are linked to their definitions as in the Developer. Users can click glossary links to display the attachments containing the definitions of the glossary terms. When you publish content that contains glossary markup to a Training Guide and Instructor Manual, a glossary is included as a list of terms and definitions at the end of the document. If you publish content containing more than one glossary to one of these document outputs, the glossaries are merged and presented as one alphabetical list. If a term appears in more than one of the merged glossaries, it is listed multiple times, once for each glossary in which it appears. However, only those terms with definition link attachments that typically appear in document outputs are included in the glossary. Specifically, the types of definition links included in the glossary sections of document outputs are package files (graphics only), web pages, and URLs (addresses only). Therefore, if a definition link is a non-graphic package file, such as an Excel spreadsheet, the corresponding term is not included in the document glossary.