If you use the setting to automatically highlight definitions in articles, you may run into situations where you don't want a term to be automatically highlighted.
You can disable automatic highlighting for the term by checking the box to Disable highlighting for this term when you add a new glossary term or edit an existing term. This setting is most often used alongside the steps in Add glossary definitions in articles manually.
Here are some reasons you may want to use this setting:
- When a single term is used in different ways within your documentation. Automatic highlighting works best when you consistently use the same term in the same way across all your documentation. But life can be messy and sometimes that doesn't happen.
- For example, you have documentation for two different products and they use the term "reviewer" differently. In this case, you may want to create separate glossary terms for each product's use of the word reviewer and disable highlighting for both of them so authors can insert the appropriate definitions manually. In this scenario, you'll probably want to use different underlying terms and/or different display titles to make it easier for your product author teams to select the correct term to insert. Refer to When should I use display titles? for more information on using display titles.
- When you have an acronym term that, in a different form, is a common word. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it can be very confusing for your readers.
- For example, you have the glossary term DO for Direct Object in your glossary. With automatic highlighting, this will also highlight instances of the regular word "do," which would be quite confusing in-context. In this case, you'd disable automatic highlighting in favor of manually inserting definitions for the acronym so that regular instances of "do" or "Do" aren't also highlighted.